More intentional camera movement photography

Usually when I'm doing intentional camera movement photography I take anywhere between a hundred and five hundred shots of one particular subject. It's not uncommon to get only one or two good ones out of a series of a few hundred. The majority always gets thrown out right away during the first pass of editing. After that, I'm left with around 10-20% of the shots.

At that point I have to walk away from them for a while, since I find it very hard to pick the best shots right after I took them. So they'll just sit patiently in their Aperture folder for a couple of days/weeks until I feel the inclination to look at them again. Only then I can quickly pick the ones I like best and, if need be, do a little post processing or cropping. That's what I did this morning with the above photo, one of a series I took a couple of weeks ago.

Normally I'll see if I can create a little series of at least three photos from the same set, but sometimes, like in this case, there's not enough shots that really grab me, or they're too similar. So I thought I'd just post this one...

Keeping it raw

Sometimes you want lots of control, to be able to tweak, post-process and color correct every single image or shot until it's exactly how it needs to be. Sometimes it's nice to keep things raw. And I don't mean shooting RAW files. Au contraire, I've been experimenting with shooting video using the Canon 5D mark II's picture styles, allowing you to bake a certain look into your shot.

Whereas you would normally shoot using relatively "flat" low contrast settings, I dialed in a harsh, high contrast black and white look. This severely limits the possibilities in post production, but that's the whole point. There's some creative satisfaction to be had from just creating things in-camera and working with what you have.

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Something completely different

The experimental photo below was inspired by the work of Shane Robinson. He uses a technique where he moves the camera around in various ways while taking photos with relatively long exposures. When I first saw his photos I thought they were paintings. I had tried something like this a while ago, with very mediocre results. Inspired by Shane's recent work, I decided to have another stab at it. This time the outcome was somewhat more presentable. However, where Shane produces his images completely in-camera, I have to admit to cheating and doing some post-processing in Aperture in order to infuse some extra oomph. I posted some more results on Flickr.

I have to say this kind of photography is quite liberating, in that you have very little control over the outcome (at my skill level at least) and the results are usually a quite surprising and unpredictable. It seems almost impossible to create the same photo twice. It also makes you look at the world around you in a completely different, less literal way. The subject for this experiment, for example, was my desk and iMac. It's like revealing a hidden world below the visible surface. A parallel world that exists on a different time scale. And it changes every time you catch a glimpse of it.

UPDATE: I've created a gallery page for my intentional camera movement photography here.

Facets - an iPhone video experiment

Above video is the result of playing around with my iPhone to see how I could use the built in video camera in new and unusual ways. I combined several videos recorded on the iPhone to form a larger composition, the same way you would stitch a number of photos together to make a panoramic image. It's kind of interesting to explore the limits of what you can do with the little iPhone camera.

I used some filters and subtle 3D movement in Final Cut Pro to make it a little more interesting. The soundtrack was created using Ableton Live and Native Instruments Kore 2 Player.

Through the lens

A different kind of TTL flash photography... Normally light is supposed to go into the lens and out again via the viewfinder, but the opposite is possible too. For this shot I fired a flash through the viewfinder at the back of a Canon 5D mk2. Part of the light reflects against the back of the camera and lights up the background, revealing the silhouette of the camera.

On the rocks

I took this photo a while ago but have been experimenting with it again lately because I wanted to achieve a certain look. What I was going for is a soft, almost painting-like background, and a more contrasty, slightly oversharpened subject and foreground. I’ve seen those two style applied separately, but I thought that by combining them I could really make the subject jump out and at the same time create a somewhat surreal effect.

When I took the shot I purposely placed the flash visibly within the frame. One reason was that when shooting with a fisheye lens you have such a wide field of view that it’s almost impossible to place a flash outside the frame and still cast any significant amount of light on your subject. But it also makes the whole scene look a bit less serious.

Liquid Time

After finishing the most recent IceScapes.tv episode I felt like doing a quick experimental project that wouldn't take weeks of work to complete. For a while I've been wanting to play with the combination of very short shutter speeds and slow-motion. The result is this ultra-short experimental film called Liquid Time.

The Canon 5d mkII allows you to film at 1/4000th of a second, at 30 frames per second. That means you can "freeze" very fast moving subjects in time. To enhance that effect I played around with the time remapping feature in Final Cut Pro, slowing down the footage to between 10% and 20% of it's normal speed, smoothly ramping up and down the speed.

In addition I wanted to try out the in-camera picture styles of the 5d to achieve a contrasty black and white effect. Normally you would do something like that in post production, so you can tweak it untill it's exactly the way you want it, but I wanted to see if I can shorten the workflow a little bit by achieving this effect inside the camera and having it already baked into the footage. In a way it's limiting oneself, but that can also be a good thing. It enables you to purely focus on the creative process without getting lost in endless post production. Also, because the camera display gives me immediate feedback of what the end result is going to look like, I might shoot the same thing differently than I would have done otherwise. With the high contrast black and white for example, you can sometimes achieve a cool effect by over- or underexposing a little, creating bright whites and deep blacks.

Timelapse experiments

Here's a little timelapse photography experiment I did for my wife Brit. It was created from around 6,000 photos taken while she was working on an artwork called "Under Pressure".