Moving car... :)

I've not really tried panning much before. Well, this is a start. I'll have to do some more to perfect it.

This is kind of an ICM I suppose as the pan didn't work entirely. But I rather like the combination.

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image.

[Developed in Lightroom for colour and exposure contrast, bringing out the yellows and controlling the reds. Reduced Clarity and Texture to enhance the blurry feel. Flipped horizontally to make it feel more dynamic.
Processed in Affinity Photo with Levels to add contrast and expand the dynamic range. Dark vignette shaped to just affect top and bottom and not sides to leave space for movement.]

Tags:   blur car evening ICM lights movement moving pan panning traffic vehicle

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Newport Beach, Pembrokeshire, West Wales.

The wet, wild, riled seas off a Welsh beach last November.

I was messing about with ICMs that day. I kind of liked this one - it seemed to sum up the feeling of the moment.

I guess it’s a sort of minimalist abstract again. But I like it and it was fun to bring together. I guess I was heading for the kind of modern painting I’ve seen hanging around some galleries.

The starting image was only about half the story. The rest was some fun messing about with Nik Color Efex. Now that’s a fun playpen of toys to mess around with! I must play a bit more because there is some good, useful stuff there.

This is a combination of five of the filters: Colour Contrast Range; Contrast Only; Film Efex: Faded (which made the strongest contribution to the end result, including the grain); Pro Contrast; and Graduated Filters.

The initial development was done with DXO Photolab 2 including straightening the horizon (!). In Affinity Photo, I tidied it up the Nik result a bit with Inpainting (context fill equivalent) though I should have done that before. A slight dark vignette which helped focus the image.

I played with the crop and tried using the Golden Spiral as a guide (if, strangely, you want to know more about where I was going on that search Golden Spiral on Wikipedia) but in the end for this picture I decided placing the apex of the beach triangle on the bottom right thirds intersection worked better (more beach!).

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy this bit of not very much, whatever it is :)

Tags:   beach bleak November rain sand storm waves weather wind Newport Beach abstract ICM minimalist Nik Color Efex dsc-rx100m5 Pembrokeshire

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Cornus Kousa tree.

This is an in-camera ICM.

And I kind of want to ask what you think an out of camera ICM would look like.... but after the awe-inspiring response to the random interrogative musings of my last post I dare not ;-)

This is a picture of the red strawberry-like fruit on the Cornus tree in my back garden.

The capture is a combination of a zoom blur and a twirl-around-the-lens-axis ICM. Which sounds terribly complicated but wasn’t.

All I had to do was hold on to the zoom barrel and twist the camera, zooming and rotating at the same time. Because the camera was held more or less steady the results were more even than I normally achieve when dancing around the camera.

The only thing that remained was to point it at various parts of the tree at varying distances to see what worked. I chose the tree for ICMs because of the red/green contrast at this time of year. This was one of the better results - I quite like it because of the cobwebby look in the middle.

Do have a go yourself, if you’ve not tried this sort of thing. Zooms vary a bit in the way they work so your technique may be different but it’s a lot of fun.

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image, but without getting too dizzy :)

[Handheld in reasonably bright conditions.
Developed in DXO Photolab 2 increasing the contrast and vibrancy but reducing the saturation (a more subtle way of improving the colour). Reduced both Clarity (to minimum) and Microcontrast to smooth the swirls. Prime noise reduction.
Processed in Affinity Photo reducing Clarity further and then sharpening what was left using High Pass/Linear burn at very low settings. A bit of inpainting to get rid of a hair on the sensor (!).
Added a curves adjustment layer in LAB mode set to increase colour contrast, but all at reduced opacity; the idea was to increase the colour range a bit but not overdo it.
The main remaining problem was uneven brightness and vibrancy across the image, the top right corner being brighter and duller. So I added two adjustment layers both gently masked using gradients for Vibrancy and Brightness (perhaps that should be called Darkness :) ).
No vignette.]

Tags:   Cornus Kousa fruit green ICM maelstrom red spiral twirl whirlpool zoom blur NIKKOR Z 24-70mm f/4 S nikon z 6

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Foggy tree.

This is a spin ICM taken on a foggy afternoon in January, on one of my local walks.

I was aiming for a kind of abstracty look, or the tree which ever you prefer :)

Andrew Haysom's excellent spreadsheet tells me that I am currenly 13.29 images behind on my 100x Monochrome & Toned image challenge, so I had better get my skates on (incidentally that's also good for ICMs).

I've just been away for a couple of weeks visiting my daughter, during which the world did a somersault. So I am now hoping to catch up a bit.

Hope you are keeping well and avoiding the news broadcasts (good for our mental health I think). Take good care of yourself my friend!

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image! Happy Thursday Monochrome :)

[Handheld in murk which may have been daylight but didn't look like it. ICM spinning around the camera's lens axis
Developed from the raw file in Photolab 3.
Processed in Silver Efex going for a dark and moody look. Added a control point to the centre to increase contrast and brightness.
Dark vignette.
Toned in a Selenium look. Added film grain based on Kodak 400Max film type preset.]

Tags:   dsc-rx100m5 100 x: The 2020 Edition 100x:2020 B&W black and white branches Donnerstagsmonochrom fog ICM Image 11/100 intentional camera movement Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 rotation spin Thursday Monochrome tree

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... just grab a camera.

It went like this. Today's Smile on Saturday theme is the rather nice one of camera.

So what to do? Ideally, it had to be either a good photo or something different. Well, good photos aren't really me... What then?

Eeek. I had a Bright Idea... never a good thing; it really needs a health warning :) What about doing one of my axial rotation ICMs of the camera in the mirror?

The theory was that the camera would take itself and, if done well, the hapless photographer's image would spin around, suitably obfuscating (lovely word! :) ) their selfie imagey thingy...

As ever, the shortest word in that last sentence proved the most problematic.

If anyone tells you ICMs are hit and miss they lie. They are all miss unless both the wind, the stars, magic and serendipity are all going your way, and about as likely as an azurine moon in a month of Sundays.

So 90 shots later this is what we have. Thank goodness I was wearing a check shirt. I'm actually standing upright with the camera held out in front.

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image. Happy Smile on Saturday :)

[(Two) hand held in mixed lighting.
Developed in Photolab trying to rescue the camera from the blacks and the check shirt too while keeping smooth blurriness. Also colour work to get rid of the tungsten + daylight issue.
In Affinity sharpened with USM; white vignette.]

Tags:   dsc-rx100m5 8.8-25.7 mm f/1.8-2.8 People Blur one Person Adult art sight Man technology image indoors Closeup human motion camera hands ICM intentional camera movement Photography Sony rotation Smile on Saturday wobbly camera

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