I wrote a couple of days ago about a walk through the walnut plantation at the Fort Harrison State Park and how I ended up shooting little things instead of big things such as walnut trees.  I have a bias toward little things but in my defense there is a lot of distracting underbrush around the walnut trees, as beautiful as they themselves are.

I went back today and much as I would like to say that I was determined to shoot big things and big things only, I just went to shoot.  It occurred to me to try a technique I learned reading William Neill’s ‘Impressions of Light’ which is available as an ebook at his website.  I regularly go back to this book for inspiration.

The technique is simple.  Slow the shutter speed and move the camera while the shutter is open.  I had done this before with images of water (I’ll cover that in a later post).  I put a four stop neutral density filter and a polarizer on the lens and shot at f/11 and  ISO 100.  This slowed the shutter down to 1/13th to 1/6th of a second for various exposures.

The camera was on the tripod and I simply moved it up and down more or less vertically to emphasize the trunks of the trees.  The brush is still present but instead of being distracting, it now it adds a bit of color.

Camera motion can be an artistic tool.  I can’t say that I know how an image is going to turn out as I am setting up the shot; I can’t previsualize with any accuracy what it is going to look like.  The ‘take’ rate, the percentage of images that turn out well, is small but I do like what the technique can do.  And the bonus is that parts of the image that are potential distractions, such as underbrush, can, with some luck, turn into desirable features of the image.

In looking at these images, I get the sense that we are seeing something about the scene that we wouldn’t see any other way.  Somehow, to use Wordsworth’s phrase, we are seeing into the life of things.  We are seeing something for which there is no immediate verbal label, something that for a short while at least, we can treat as new.  That is something we expect of art and something we hope for as spiritual seekers.