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?