Here are a few shots I liked from my day out and about in the Black Hills in South Dakota. I had a great time with my family exploring and taking all kinds of pictures. I went through a roll and a half of my film too, which was awesome. This was the first time using that camera.
I did not get to try the double exposure idea I had, but there’s always tomorrow, where I will be in the Badlands!
I didn’t spend too much time editing these, just very brief and cursory edits and crops. I plan to spend more time when I get home going through the shots I took. In total, I took 129 shots across my two cameras. I honestly expected to take more, but I think this is a healthy amount for the time spent.
I was messing with Darktable, an editing suite that’s free and available on my laptop running Linux. I quite liked this version of one of the pictures, but the colors are off just enough for me to not like it more than one that’s true to color.
I find ICM (intentional camera movement) to be fascinating, and I got this shot just playing around with it. I love how abstract it turned out and the almost painterly quality to it is nice.
ICM is when we intentionally introduce motion while the exposure is being made. It creates such unique compositions that I love it. I am sure to play more with it in the future. I made several photos before landing on this one as my favorite. The others just didn’t speak to me like this one has. I experimented with the shutter speed and the amount of motion applied during exposure.
This is picture of my kitchen, but it could be representative of much more than that. The flow of light and the dark shapes hidden within could be telling a story. One of chaos and magic. In any event, I’m in love with the result.
What story does this evoke for you? For me, I think it is almost a mirror of my soul. It’s chaotic, unsure of itself. But also soft and has a flowy nature. I think that’s why it resonates with me so. It’s familiar but at once unrecognizable.
I shot this at around f11 on my 7artisans 35mm manual lens, so at the start, everything was in focus. But, I shot it at a shutter speed of a half second. I use auto ISO and it came up with 640 for this shot. I moved the camera in a tight circle while the shutter was open to create this effect.
I played with the exposure and contrast in post-processing to get the image above. Adding a slight exposure gain to make the image slightly brighter. I also upped the contrast and deepened it with a tone curve.
I balanced out some of the colors to get a more even color palette. The orange becoming more yellow and the blues more purple, to have a unique complementary color palette.
All told, I love the process and mood of this photo. I will have to play around with it more to figure out the right balance of motion to shutter speed so that images come out more recognizable. But I love how this one image came out.
Do you have any experience with ICM? What are your thoughts on the artistic nature of it?
I love the idea of a double exposure, and while I can’t do that with my Sony camera, I can emulate it with photoshop. I was just playing around and came up with this image that I only kinda like but wanted to share. What are your thoughts?
I have a Canon AE-1 film camera that I plan to play around with this weekend on a trip to South Dakota. I have some Ilford HP5 film, and I can do a true double exposure with it. I have yet to use this camera but am super excited to do so. One of the pictures, I plan to get a landscape and then some of my family in as a double exposure. I think it will add some great ghost like qualities to it. Not that they are ghosts, but they might certainly look like it in that image.
In any event, I greatly look forward to this trip and playing around with my kit. I will post some during that trip too. Stay tuned for more!
