Abstract Photography – Art or Awful

There are many shades of abstract photography…

They can range from images made of recognisable object but the essence of the image is about shapes, colours & patterns to those where it is purely about colours, shapes & patterns and the original subject is completely unrecognisable. In this post I explore something in between…

You may, or may not, have heard of ICM photography. ICM stand for Intentional Camera Movement.

Usually in photography, we are trying to eliminate camera movement by choosing an appropriate shutter speed to ensure that the image is sharp, typically using the 1 / focal length minimum shutter speed rule, although with today’s high megapixel cameras some people recommend 1 / 2x focal length.

With ICM we deliberately choose a slow shutter speed – 1/10th or less typically – and then move the camera while the shutter is open to create deliberate blur in the image. The longer the shutter speed & the faster you move the camera the more blurred the image will be.

This sort of photography need some strong elements in the underlying image. And then moving the camera in the same direction generally works best as in this shot with tree.

This next shot is of tall delphinium flower spikes but I’ve moved the camera horizontally & you can see that it doesn’t work. There’s not enough of the original subject to give any reference point so it just looks a blurred mess.

Other strong elements to look out for are blocks of strong colour or lights that will leave streaks when you move the camera.

I recently went into Birmingham experimenting with this technique, & the fun thing is that you never quite know what you are going to end up with. I looked for shop fronts with lights, posters and bold logos and played with moving the camera in all sorts of directions. I also took a still, non blurred image of the shop front. In photoshop I then overlaid this over my chosen ICM image at about 10-20% opacity & used a layer mask to just allow a little bit of reality to show through where I wanted it. Click on the images for a larger view.

You’ll see that, in some, I’ve moved the camera in a wavy pattern, some its a sweeping diagonal curve, & the Zara shop I’ve moved straight up as I though that worked with the tall mannequins in the window & the architecture above the window.

In some of them I’ve captured ghostly shapes of people walking by, in others I’ve brought a bit of reality back so you can glimpse the people in the shops.