Friday, November 7, 2008

Slight editing necessary


Mud path (reinterpreted), originally uploaded by jiihaa.

One of the photos which I took today was very dark, but had an interesting texture. The photo was a handheld long exposure while walking along a mud path across a meadow. In postprocessing I did some exposure, contrast and saturation changes, and the resulting photo is quite interesting. Actually, is this a photo any more? It is more light painting than photography.

This opens up new possibilities for handheld long-exposure photography. Perhaps I could use even longer exposure (now typically 2-8 seconds), and do all kinds of movements with the camera, sort of painting a texture to the sensor, and later do some serious postprocessing to get the image out of the data - "develop it into a photo".

Is someone doing this already? I would expect that this is a far from unique idea.

2 comments:

x said...

It seems very interesting, I think William Neill talks about something similar in his article Impressions of Light at Luminous-Landscape.

I see what you mean by painting, I though would like to 'keep' it at photography, and 'just' use the technique to enhance a photographic scene.

Juha Haataja said...

Thanks for pointing this article out, it was most useful.