Thursday, March 27, 2014

Michael Zimney - Extended Seeing - Let the Light do the Work



                For this section I wanted to embrace darkness and how I could use very little light to enhance such images, given that we were using long shutter times.  I also tried to embrace the aspect of blurring and “smearing” of images to attempt to create art and abstract rather than typical photos that simply captured distorted, but otherwise recognizable, images.  I selected 2 photos for my recipe.  For both photos I used my Iphone 5S, operating system 7.0.2.  The first is a self-portrait in which I have my arm up over my head.  I used an app called “Long Expo”.  I set the exposure to “low light” and adjusted the shutter speed to 4 seconds.  I made sure the light level in the room was low and then switched the cam in my phone to “selfie” mode.  I took several photos with different poses and varied the length of shutter exposure.  For this photo I had the lens open for just over 1 second and shifted my pose only slightly, which created the ghost-like image around my body.  The darkness of the room combined with the extended light exposure cast an “erie” tone across the whole photo which made the whole thing feel “undead”.  In the second photo, I went out onto my deck at night.  Using the same app, I selected “light trail” as the setting and adjusted the shutter speed to manual.  Holding the phone as still as possible I opened the lens and let it stay open for what must have been about 5 seconds, while I watched what little light there was spill into the photo.  The result was a photo that was very “painting” like.  With both photos I did not do any post photo production, other than a slight bit of cropping for each, just to center the images the way I wanted them to be framed.  I was really trying to use the long exposure time to create art and visual imagery more than just distorted photos of otherwise ordinary things.  I wanted to try to embrace more muted and dull tones and allow the light to do the work as opposed to the color.

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