More Than One Way

Several days ago, inspired by videos I had been watching of the work of Andy Graham and John Dexter, I went out with my camera to practice some more Intentional Camera Movement photography. This sort of photography is always very experimental and you never know if you have anything worthwhile until you can look at it on the computer. There is typically a lot of junk created during the process, but you have to be careful about what you delete because within that questionable image there might be the seed of something that could be quite good and arresting. That also means that you should have a sense of adventure, not only in the taking and saving of an image, but also with any post processing you might consider. As a general rule most ICMs benefit from at least a little post processing. This can be anything from just tweaking exposure, brightness, and color temperature, to more involved things like layering, blend modes, and different kinds of filters. But almost always this is where the adventure begins. I can liken it a bit to what it must feel like for a painter to start applying paint to a blank canvas. As I mentioned in my Tuesday post about this, I had never considered layering two ICMs as Andy Graham regularly does. But I had also not tried some of the camera movements that John Dexter tries when he is taking these kinds of images. In addition, Monday I also experimented more with different camera exposure settings than I had done before. Yesterday I had time to take two of my images from the Monday shoot that were similar, but different in movement, and layer and combine them after I tweaked exposure, brightness, and color temperature in both. The above image is the result of that combination. I think it has kind of a plaid effect. And I really like it. But then I wondered what would happen if I started experimenting more with the image and tried out some blend modes and added some filters. Below is what happened then. The radical color change is the result of using the exclusion blend mode, which I then tweaked with sunshine and blur filters and a final addition of just the hint of a sun flare. The result is a very startling difference and an image that I now thinks seems to have more actual depth. I really like it, too. Which one is better? I have no idea because they each speak to me differently. That is the joy of trying to find more than one way.