Week Twelve - Spring, Fresh, and New to You
The challenge for this week is very broad and vague…for a good reason.
It took me almost the entire week to nail down what exactly I wanted to do for it. As usual for me, this comes in the form of inspiration by watching the many photography channels I follow on YouTube.
The YouTuber this time is Kim Grant, her channel is very nice and I find her narration very calming.
The episode I watched just had her out photographing some heather. She was having some challenges, compositionally, and decided to try out ICM or “In Camera Movement”. The funny part of this being an inspiration to me was that she even comments in the video about not liking the outcomes that much or at least being underwhelmed.
It was the exact opposite for me, I loved how the images didn't look anything like photographs to me. They looked like brush strokes using the color palette of the heather as the paint. My wife and I were already planning to attend this year’s almond blossom festival and I knew/hoped that I would find the right combinations of color to attempt some shots.
I watched a ton of videos in the couple days before the festival to understand how the technique works. I feel like I had a good handle, at least fundamentally, on how it worked.
Upon arriving, funnily enough I saw a lot of flowers that looked a lot like heather…BUT…that was too close to the original inspiration. I didn’t want to copy the exact subject as the video that inspired me. My wife assures me that it wasn’t heather in the first place, lol.
I started getting test shots on random trees as we walked and I immediately realized something that had me very worried. It was very bright outside, making longer shutter speeds very hard to get without getting an all white & blown out result. I left my ND filters at home purely from the point of view of not doing any long exposure photography. I didn't even think of the possibility of not being able to get down to 1/4 on the shutter.
I set everything that I could to slow the speed down…ISO 50, F22 and the light meter still showed slightly overexposed at a 1/8 shutter speed. This is as good as I am going to get, hopefully I can walk away with a keeper.
Every tree we walked by, if I liked the general balance of colors, I would try out a couple shots. I always feel bad for my wife having to stand and wait for me to take a ton of experimental shots, but now I felt even worse because I must have looked crazy from the outsider’s perspective…randomly moving my camera around in random directions while taking pictures.
In the end I ended up with a lot of throwaways, some interesting ones that looked like the tree was being beamed up in Star Trek and fortunately one keeper!
I don't know what it is exactly, but I am over the moon with how this picture came out. I think it is very pretty and I am actually tempted to make this my second picture I have ever printed. I just am obsessed with how it fits into my original goal. You can’t tell this picture came from an almond blossom tree, all I did was “borrow” the color palette for my “brush strokes”. For this shot specifically, I like how the camera movement even gives the appearance of actual strokes of a paint brush, up and down.
I know one of the weekly challenges later on is for ICM, but I am really glad I tried something new for this challenge so that I have the baseline to use later on. I am also happy to have added something into my toolbox when looking for compositions. Now I will always be looking at pleasing colors and wondering how it would look like with this technique.
