If at first you don't succeed, try again...

I wrote a couple of posts ago about going out with my son to photograph a sunset. Unfortunately the sunset never really eventuated that evening, but I managed to turn lemons into lemonade (metaphorically speaking) and came away with some ICM (intentional camera movement) images that I really liked (see here).

Josh is going back to Uni this week so we decided to give it another try, since the weather has been consistently good while he's been home (clear, crisp winter days). We gave ourselves a little more time for this trip, and headed out to our location a good hour before sunset. Due to the current position of the setting sun, we figured our best bet was to go to the Blaketown Tiphead.

FYI: Tiphead simply means the end of a long and narrow point - in this case the road that leads out to the end of Blaketown and into the Tasman Sea. This area is also sometimes referred to as the Southern Breakwater, with its companion the Northern Breakwater (or Cobden Tiphead) forming the mouth of the Grey River as it enters Greymouth from the Tasman Sea. It can be very rough and treacherous for fishing boats coming into Greymouth when conditions are rough - and can make for some spectacular photos. I've yet to photograph this, since as stated, the conditions are usually less than ideal. Not the kind of weather I think about taking my camera out in. Even though the E-M1 and my 12-50mm EZ lens are weatherproof. Still....! Maybe oneday?

Who you lookin at? Olympus OM-DE-M1 with Lumix 45-150. f/6.3 @ 1/125th, ISO 200

With plenty of time to look for the composition I wanted at sunset, when we arrived at our destination my attention was immediately caught by the seagulls that perch on the rocks surrounding the Tiphead. There was some lovely evening light as the sun was sinking behind a bank of clouds (more on those later). The seagulls, who were extremely chill and very used to having humans around, were posing politely (mostly) for us, as we snapped away from a very close distance. You can often get within a few feet of them, so very close-up and detailed images can be had.

Seagull silhouette. E-M1 with Lumix 45-150mm. f/5.6 @ 1/3200th, ISO 200 

Seagulls are scavengers, and can get quite aggressive with each other if food is around. If you happen to be eating anything near one, you will most likely suddenly find yourself surrounded by dozens and dozens of them. But if you don't have any food, they do tend to leave you alone (thankfully). Because of this scavenger reputation, they aren't one of the most popular birds to photograph. And yet they can be quite beautiful, with their bright white body feathers, grey wings and red beaks. And, of course, if you manage to capture them in silhouette like I have in the above image, then it's hard to tell what kind of bird it is (unless you're an avid bird watcher of course). 

Taking the Shot. OM-D E-M1 with Zuiko 12-50mm EZ. f/6.3 @ 1/160th, ISO 200

As the sun began to set, it became obvious that we were once again going to be thwarted by a large bank of cloud on the horizon. As you can see, there was still a strip of golden light, and this was giving us some colour in the sky, but not really what we had hoped for. Still, undaunted, we began to set up our tripods - me on one side of the road and Josh on the other.

It was at this point that I discovered a problem. I'd left my tripod mounting plate at home on my office desk! I had taken it off the tripod head to attach it to the camera prior to going out - to save time in the field. But I had obviously been distracted at that crucial moment (I'm getting old), and had forgotten to attach it! Doh!

Surprisingly though, shooting into the light and letting the foreground go to a silhouette, I was getting very hand-holdable exposure times. I had switched from my Panasonic 45-150mm telephoto to my Olympus 12-50mm EZ lens, and at the wide end of the range I was easily able to take pin-sharp images hand-held at exposures of around 1/160th to 1/200th of a second. The ibis (in body image stabilisation) on the E-M1 is fantastic, but even so, the shutter speeds I was getting were fast enough for it not to be a concern.

Cobden Tiphead at last light. E-M1 with 12-50mm EZ. f/5.6 @ 1/2sec, ISO 400 

But eventually, the light did drop significantly enough that I had to start relying on image stabilisation to get sharp images. The above image was taken at half a second - obviously with image stabilisation turned on - and is tack sharp! Just amazing.

I know that the very latest ibis in the Olympus E-M1x and E-M1 Mk3 is even better, with people hand-holding for over 2 seconds and still getting sharp results. But for an old fella like me, who comes from the film days when tripods were a necessity if you shot below 1/60th, hand-holding and getting a sharp image at even half a second is mind-blowing.

I don't try to push my luck with image stabilisation - preferring to work from a tripod or follow the focal length rule for hand-holding as much as possible (shutter speed = or greater than the focal length of lens). But in this instance, I had no option, since I had left the tripod mounting plate at home. 

Breakwater blur. E-M1 with Zuiko 12-50mm EZ. f/20 @ 2.5secs, ISO 200 

Although I was successfully getting half-second exposures, I know when I've reached my limit. For the last few images of the evening, I switched back into ICM (intentional camera movement) mode, and captured some abstract photos of the waves coming in.

Once again, these happen to be my favorite images of the evening. They just resonate with me emotionally and creatively. I'm sure there are some who might look at them and think they're just blurry, out of focus photos. While others may even question whether it's a photograph at all?

But I simply adore them. And I think I'm going to be doing a lot more of them in the future. I already have the urge to get a collection of them together and have an exhibition somewhere. It's been a long time since I put together an exhibition of my work, but I've been mulling it over a lot lately. I guess I wasn't really sure what the exhibition might be about - but now I think I do. So yeah - hopefully an exhibition is on the cards. Don't know where, don't know when (apologies to Vera Lynn) - but I will definitely post about it on the blog when I do.

If in doubt, shoot ICM

My son is home this week (as I write this) from Uni, and we decided to go out while the weather was cooperating to photograph a sunset. The last few nights have been crisp and clear, with a lot of colour in the sky. So we were hopeful of a good night's photography.

Point Elizabeth. Olympus OM-D E-M1 with Zuiko 12-50 EZ. f/22 @ 1/5th sec, ISO 200

We had a few errands to do before heading out, so by the time we got our gear together, sunset was fast approaching. We decided therefore, to go down to Point Elizabeth, just 5 minutes away from home by car - as good a spot as any to catch the sunset. Unfortunately when we got there, it quickly became apparent that we weren't going to be treated to an overly colourful sunset.

Not to be deterred, we both headed along the beach looking for compositions - hoping that things might change and the light might suddenly erupt in a blaze of colour. No such luck...

In these circumstances, faced with only ok to average conditions (there was some colour in the sky) and rapidly decreasing light, I switch gears from traditional photography mode and go into 'creative' mode. These are perfect conditions for ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) photography.

Evening glow. Olympus E-M1 with Zuiko 12-50mm EZ. f/16 @ 1/8th sec. ISO 200

I absolutely love doing ICM photography. In fact, I don't know why I don't do it more often? I've been experimenting with intentional camera movement long before it was the 'trendy' thing to do (it did the rounds on Youtube about a year ago). I love the beautiful abstract quality of images that you can create with this technique. They remind me of a Turner painting, where the landscape and weather conditions are expressed abstractly rather than figuratively. And they also happen to be a lot of fun to create.

Point Elizabeth Sunset. OM-D E-M1 with Zuiko 12-50mm EZ lens. f/16 @ 1/6th sec, ISO 200

I'm fairly certain that I've written about this technique before on my blog (probably more than once), but I'll go over it again quickly to save you from having to go back and find it 😄

Basically, set a very small aperture (f/16, f/22) so you restrict the amount of light reaching the sensor. This will give you longer shutter speeds as a result. You want longer shutter speeds so you can create the 'intentional' blur. But you also don't really want it to go on for too long, or the image will just end up a complete blurry mess! I still like to retain a very obvious feeling of the image being a landscape - grounded in some reality - rather than a completely abstract image. So around a half to 2 seconds is usually about right. If the light is getting low, and you set your camera at f/16 (and use your lowest ISO), then you should easily be getting half-second shutter speeds.

Golden Light. Olympus E-M1 with Zuiko 12-50mm EZ. f/13 @ 2 secs, ISO 200

Once you've set a small aperture, giving a longish shutter speed, then the last thing you'll want to do (if your camera/lens has it) is turn image stabilisation OFF. You are trying to create some camera shake and blur in your photos after all. Having image stabilisation turned on will only freak the camera out and make it fight against you.

And then, have at it! Hand-hold your camera (no tripods allowed) and wiggle it around during the exposure. Move it slowly, quickly, horizontally, vertically.... just play! Again, as I said earlier, I still like my abstract ICM images to look like landscapes - but with the added abstraction created by the camera movement.

But it's really up to you how you decide to move the camera around, and what kind of results you'll get doing it. Take LOTS of images. And this is a time when it is ok to 'chimp' the back of your camera, since the feedback you'll get from your camera movements will be invaluable. If I flick or move a certain way, and like the result on the lcd screen, then I'll do the same action a few more times. The results are always different, but I usually find one in the series that I really like.

Point Elizabeth Abstract. OM-D E-M1. f/16 @ 1/2sec, ISO 200

Be prepared to take hundreds of images, and then throw away 99% of them. It's a very hit and miss technique - with a lot more miss than hit. But if you do come away with one or two keepers, they may just become some of  your best images. If you haven't already, give it a try. You might find, like me, that it will become one of your favourite ways to create unique photographs.  

Long exposure iPhone images with Spectre

When I wus lad (he said, using his best cockney accent) there was a hair cream advert on TV that used the catch-phrase "I never thought I'd see the day..."

Fast forward forty years, and this phrase is playing over in my head as I sit to write this post.

I've written previously, probably many times in this very blog, about my dismissal of the iPhone (and mobile phones in general) as a 'serious' image capturing device. Nevermind that the weight of popular opinion would suggest otherwise. Flickr's 2017 data has the iPhone as the most used camera with 54% (over half) of the top 100 cameras used by photographers. Canon is next with 23%, and Nikon is 3rd with 18%.

Now granted, Flickr probably isn't the powerhouse photography app it used to be, and probably only a tiny fraction (if any) of those statistics relate to professional photographers. But still, it's a very impressive win for the iPhone in the 'every-day' photography category - which we all know makes up the bulk of today's plethora of image taking.

Does that mean, therefore, that my opinion of using an iPhone/mobile phone for photography has changed? Well yeah, it kinda does. And actually, it changed a couple of years ago when my daughter got her new iPhone 7Plus. The dual 12MP rear cameras (one 28mm wide and one 56mm telephoto) are capable of taking stunning photos. So much so, that the iPhone 7 was the 'camera' Emily used to create her Yr13 Photography portfolio.

I have an iPhone 6, with a 8MP rear facing single camera (about 30mm wide), so it's not as good (not surprisingly). In good light it's not terrible, but it's also no Canon 5D Mk4 (although neither is the iPhone 7 to be fair). Yet if we look at mobile phone companies like Huawei, who are partnering with Leica to produce a 40MP camera on their phones, then it's quite obvious that it's only going to get better and better. Will the camera phone seriously challenge the DSLR eventually? Probably.

Spectre iPhone app - an AI powered 'long exposure' app

Where am I going with all this? (Yes, for heaven's sake, get to the point man)! All that is to say that 'yes', I am using my iPhone more for taking photos (and certainly for capturing video). And a perfect case-in-point was just the other night when I went to my local camera club's monthly meeting. I was there to push (err, I mean discuss) my 'advanced' photography workshop running this weekend (as I write this). But it just so happened that this coincided with a hands-on practical session photographing dancers.

I didn't have my camera with me (big shot advanced photography teacher who doesn't bring a camera to a photography club gathering), but I did have my iPhone (of course). The lighting in the hall where the meeting was being held was tricky (some spotlighting, some dark shadows, some bright colours), so I decided to shoot long exposures on my iPhone using a recently acquired app - Spectre. Yeah, I know, sounds very cool - right? Very James Bond. And it is very cool - for an iPhone camera app.

Dancers. iPhone 6 with Spectre app. 3 second long exposure.

The app is actually designed to help you create long exposure shots of waterfalls and such so you can achieve that silky smooth smokey water effect or long light trail images. You can choose between 3, 5 and 9 second exposures, and can even get away with the 3 second exposures hand-held if there's enough light around. Pretty impressive in theory, but I'd never actually used it in practice.

At the Bar. iPhone 6 with Spectre app. 3 second long exposure

Because there definitely wasn't enough light around, I knew I was going to get a lot of blurring in the final images. So I chose a 3 second long exposure time and tried to use the blurring of the dancer's movements in my favour. Using the app was as simple as choosing the 3 seconds on the dial, pushing the shutter button, and watching while the image blur built up on the screen. Very cool.

If there was too much subject and camera movement, the final result was almost unrecognisable. But if I timed it so that there was a short period of static pose before movement, then the resulting image seemed to make more sense.

Twirling Dervishes. iPhone 6 with Spectre app. 3 second long exposure

I'm a huge fan of ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) photography, so this was right up my alley. I wasn't worrying about taking sharp, clear images - in fact just the opposite. If there was a lot of movement happening in front of me, then I just held the camera reasonably steady and captured the movement of the dancers. If the scene was more static, then I moved the phone itself to create the motion blur.

Ethereal Dancers. iPhone 6 with Spectre app. 3 second long exposure

I love this last image, especially converted to black and white. It has a beautifully spooky yet graceful quality to it. Could I have taken the same shot with my DLSR? Yes, of course I could. You might even argue that it would have been even better, since I would have had even more control over shutter speeds (you're limited to just the 3, 5 and 9 with Spectre). And yet, looking around the room at the other images taken that evening - all on DSLR's - there weren't any that looked quite like the ones I'd managed to capture on my iPhone using Spectre. There were some great images, don't get me wrong. But mostly they had gone for telephoto, close-cropped, sharp results. Everything I couldn't do on the iPhone 6, even if I'd wanted to.

Using Spectre on the iPhone was also just a whole heap of fun! Far too often we, as 'serious' photographers, disregard the fun factor. I know I do. The simplicity of whipping out your phone, clicking on an app, and creating beautiful images in seconds - with the minimal of fuss and gear - is also quite liberating and can't be stressed enough. It was actually being limited by the gear that I was using that forced me to think differently, and thereby craft images that I might not otherwise have considered taking.

So maybe it isn't the iPhone that's going to revolutionise photography or our images going forward? Maybe it's using the tools we have at our disposal and then thinking creatively, outside the box, to craft images that stand out from the crowd, no matter what we're using to create them with? Just a thought...

Olympus OMD EM5 MkII Abstract Landscapes

A photographer friend of mine (Hi Stew) and I went out shooting last evening to grab a sunset along the Coast Road.

Unfortunately, it didn't really eventuate - even though the night before (and the one after) were fantastic! Murphey's Law in practise once again :-(

17 Mile Beach Sunset. Olympus OMD EM5 MkII with Zuiko 12-50mm f3.5/6.3. F4.5 @ 80th sec. ISO 500

It never got better than the image above, with fairly flat lighting, but still some elements of colour. Whenever I'm presented with these conditions I think of two things; black & white and ICM (Intentional Camera Movement).

Olympus OMD EM5 MkII with 9mm Fisheye bodycap lens. F8 125th sec at ISO 1600

So I tried the black and white first, although there isn't a lot of contrast in the scene to really make black and white work. It's OK, but not great.

The light, what there was of it, was fading fast - perfect conditions for the long shutter speeds required for ICM photographs. But if you want to 'intentionally' blur your images with an Olympus mirrorless, then you need to turn the Image Stabilisation OFF first - it really is that good.

Olympus OMD EM5 MkII with 12-50mm EZ lens. F16 @  0.8secs, ISO 200

I aslo turned Auto ISO to OFF, setting the camera at its lowest ISO of 200 (for longer exposures). I then began to move the camera around as I exposed - effectivley 'painting with light' with the camera as the paintbrush. There are an infinite number of ways of moving the camera, so the results are practicaly limitless - and a whole lot of fun.

Olympus OMD EM5 MkII with 12-50mm EZ lens. F16 @ 2.5secs, ISO 200

With some colour still in the sky, the exposures weren't too long - only about 2 to 3 seconds. This is long enough to get some movement, but short enough to still retain a lot of the detail in the image. The result is a mysterious lansdcape that is obviously blurred, but still very readable as a landscape picture.

Olympus OMD Em5 MkII with 12-500mm EZ lens. F11 @ 3.5secs, ISO 200

The longer the exposure, the less landscapy the images are - and the more abstract they become. I'm a huge art  lover, and one of my favourite artists is Turner. His abstract expressionist paintings have always inspired me, and I strive for that look and feel in my ICM images.

Olympus OMD EM5 MkII with 12-50mm EZ. F16 @ 5secs. ISO 200.

ICM is a lot of fun and can really create some strikingly beautiful images. Granted, they may be more like paintings than traditional photographs - but therein lies the joy of experimentation.

Olympus OM-D EM-5 MkII with Zuiko 12-50mm EZ. F11 @ 8secs, ISO 200

Next time you're faced with a landscape that isn't quite doing it for you in terms of light and drama, think about slowing down your camera and trying some ICM (Intentional Camera Movement). It can be very counter-intuative at first - especially if you're used to shooting landscapes on a tripod. But once you start seeing the results on the lcd screen, and realise how liberating it can be to intentionally shoot for blur, then I think you'll be hooked on the technique. Enjoy!

Intentional Camera Movement

I thought I should post a few images after a dirge of technical posts.

I think I've found my photography 'mojo' recently after playing with the popular 'intentional camera movement' technique. Lots of photographers are using it to spark more creativity in their work, and it's certainly done the trick for me.

Kapiti Island, Raumati Beach, Wellington

It actually started early last year, when I was on holiday in Wellington. We stayed at Raumati, and would spend the evening walking on the beach. I took a lot of 'sharp' images of the island, and once I had them in the bag, just started to 'play' with panning the camera during long exposures.

I was happy with the results, and they were some of my favourite shots from the holiday.

Coal Creek Forest Interior

Didn't think much more of the long exposure shots until I was out taking photos with my daughter in the West Coast bush and I wanted to show her how to have fun and be creative with her camera. So we experimented again with long exposure shots, this time panning vertically to echo the trees. Again, came back with some shots I really loved.

Cobden Tiphead

So then I realised there might actually be something to all of this long exposure stuff, and I started going out to intentionally make things happen. I'm fortunate to live close to coastal beaches, with lots of opportunities to experiment with the coastline, rocks, waves etc. The late evening light and a reasonably small aperture (f16) gives me plenty of long blurring shutter speeds.

Breaking Waves

I'm enjoying shooting everything from abstract wave action, to more obvious landscapes. I find the natural movement of the waves helps to increase the blurring effect, but it's not absolutely necessary to shoot around water - I just like it :-)

Cobden Beach

There's so much scope to take this Intentional Camera Movement technique in so many directions, but be prepared to take LOTS of photos. I find I shoot about 100 of one subject, and maybe get two that I like!? There's no set formula for how long to leave the shutter open, which way to move the camera or even 'how' to move the camera. Shimmy, shake, rock and roll (or even pan if you have to) - it's all good.

I plan to do some more forest interiors next. Got a few ideas for some very abstract fern images. Can't wait.