Wedding Photographer, Wakefield, West Yorkshire
abstract
Abstract Photographic Art: Parabolas
Sep 21st
ISO200, 16mm, f/2.8, 48 seconds
Hey folks, saw this abstract art technique recently and thought I’d put it out there if you didn’t know about it. Light trails can make some great images, all you need is a tripod and a small light (and a camera, obviously). It relies on opening the shutter for several seconds and drawing something with a little pen light. This technique is pretty similar. You need to be in a really dark room and have a shutter release cable attached as some exposures can run into minutes.
ISO100, 16mm, f/11 172 Seconds
All you do is hang a small pen light from the ceiling, I just used a bit of duck tape to hold the string and torch up. Lie the camera flat on the floor directly below the light and try and get the focus locked on to the light and then set it to manual focus. Set the camera to Bulb mode (B) or manual (M, manual mode will only allow 30 seconds maximum so if you have a cable release, use bulb), ISO at 100 and aperture may vary depending on the brightness of the torch. In the photos here I used f/2.8 as the first torch was very dim then when I swapped torches I had to use f/11, if you do a few test shots first you’ll get an idea of the aperture needed. Once everything is set to go, turn off the lights and set the light swinging, open the shutter for say 1-2 minutes and see what you get. I used a wide angle here so I could use a long piece of string but it depends on what you have available.
ISO100, 16mm, f/11 159 Seconds
The result is and abstract parabolic swirl. You can use lightroom to adjust any colours either with white balance or split toning and maybe increase the blacks to make sure no light has spilled onto any surrounding furniture. Good luck if you try it folks, varying the starting direction will massively alter the end result.
Ice Ice Baby
Jan 4th
Taking a break from landscapes I got this on one of my rambles, I liked the abstract quality and the wavey lines in the ice. The pebbles break it up a little and add a focal point but to be honest there wasn’t a huge amount of compositional thought behind this one. A lot of photo mags say it’s a good idea to freeze some leaves in a plastic tub to get some abstract ice shots, I’ve not tried it myself but it seems like a decent rainy day thing if you are into macro photography. As for exif, this was ISO100, f/8,1/25 at 70mm.Adventures in Macro Photography
Apr 9th
A bit of a lazy day photography wise today, I ended up getting back into my macro mode, I used to do quite a lot of macro stuff but haven’t recently, (the same could be said for blog posts!) Anyway there were no fancy lights involved or even tripods used in this shot. It was taken over a sink of water with natural light from the outside causing the refracting in the bubbles to get the colour. The exif is as follows: 1/200 at f5.6 ISO800 with my sigma 50mm macro lens. I decided to stop when I started dipping my camera in the water. As the ISO was a bit higher than I usually like I ran it through noise ninja, a plugin for CS3 which does a good job of removing noise. I’m not sure about the open space at the top but I’m not a huge fan of changing aspect ratios so I left it in. Running a Bath
Nov 19th
This was just a quick abstract I took last night whilst the bath was running, I’ve manipulated the colours in lightroom and added a radial gradient in photoshop, thats the greenish curve. It was all fairly experimental, but I was in a bathroom with no windows!Un Disastro de Electricidad
Nov 8th
This is a photograph of one of those plasma lamps that, without being overly technical, use electricity. If interested you can learn all about them here. They make great photographic subjects and can edited to produce very abstract results. They are fairly easy to photograph however you do have to be on full manual and in a dark room. Shutter speeds can run to many seconds but this gives a very different result to the one seen here. This image was exposed for 0.6 sec at f/8.0 at ISO400. The shutter was about as slow as I could go to keep the beams defined. You can get a wide range of results, just keep reviewing them after changing any settings.Smoke
Sep 25th
I was just clearing my lightroom database and I came across this one so I posted it, I haven’t done one of these for a while, it’s a really easy technique, I shot this at f11, 1/250 iso 200. I used an off camera flash to light it from the side. This is shot on a black background, just a piece of card should do it then all you need to do is invert the colours when you process it, ie black becomes white etc. Colour can be added as an overlay or by playing with your white balance settings and the hue/saturation layers. I also have a rainbow tinted smoke trail on my site from the same shoot as this.
