Ghosting

Moving the camera through exposure on static subjects gives the impression of them moving and produces an ethereal ghostly image.
What would be better than to apply this technique to a (graffitied) ghost and produce an even more ghostly/ghastly image ;-)

Da Ghost:


You can really see him coming after you...

One Second

Here is my series from one walk at dusk:

Trees:


Bow:


Dusk:


Looming:

To appreciate this image, you should click through to the larger flickr-version!

Flash:


All were shot at 1 second, -1EV and with a 50mm lens which was easy to rotate around the horizontal axis during exposure (only "Bow" was captured with rotating the camera around the optical axis).
If you ask me whether I rotated up or down, I honestly don't know. Only thing I know is that I tried a good many combinations of moving and holding to get these results. And was really happy to have a DSLR at hand so that I could review the results immediately. It was quite a hit and miss thing and the results highly random at first. But after getting the hang of it and seeing what worked and what not it became gradually easier.

I have a nice slideshow with images from this series here. Enjoy!

This series was really inspired by the Miyelo series from Viggo Mortensen. His images of dancing Indians performing their traditional Lakota Ghost Dance seem to capture the spirit of this people in a wonderful way. And as I love to capture trees and their "spirit" I immediately saw this technique as interesting. See an interesting overview of his art, music & poetry.

I hope you find the results as inspiring as I.

Rotating Trees

I've shown what you can achieve through rotating the camera around the lens-axis in one of my earliest posts. I gave this technique another try with a tree whose structure seemed to be quite adequate for it.

Fractal Tree:

Shot with a 50mm lens at f/16, 1/4 sec

Through the rotation the details of the tree are veiled and the Gestalt/character of it brought forward.

Hommage a trois (3b): David Hockney

Thinking a bit more about my failure to find a "Hockneyish" reference in my own photographs, I stumbled across an older image that picks up on at least three aspects of his work
- it's huge: the original has almost 50 Mega-pixels and could easily be printed 3m high at 80 dpi
- it's stiched: a vertical panorama made from five single shots
- it's about trees and woods



I applied some tweaks to colors and contrast to abstractify the trees a little and emphasize the glow of the snow-white light. Stitching was done in PS4 with the photomerge function which gives a nice reference to the name of my blog: The image was produced by rotating the camera vertically for each shot taken and merging them together in post.
Thus: RotoMerge.

If you want to know how David Hockney "completed his biggest ever painting", have a look at this article.

Images speak louder than words

Before digging deeper into the mysteries of abstract and not so abstract photography with words I've gone to the task of collecting some of my images in a newly created RotoMerge flickr-set and also added some links at the bottom to artists that inspire my. There are some images from Philipp Keel's book "color" in his facebook, and for only 15€ it's a steal and can give you quite some inspiration.

So have a sneak peek at my RotoMerge set to get an idea, of which type of images I'm trying to create and talk about in my blog.

And to explain a bit about the name of my blog here's one image that shows the results of rotating the camera during a 1/8th second exposure: