There are two types of zoom lenses: pull and twizzle.

There are two ways to create a zoom blur with a twizzle zoom. Either you hold the camera still and twizzle the zoom or you hold the zoom and twizzle the camera.

This is a camera twizzle (of our Christmas tree lights). With extra, subtle, hand wobbles as I am sure you have come to expect.

It's one image, but duplicated in processing and the copy rotated 90 degrees and blended with Screen blend mode (we need more lights on the tree ;) ). Stray light was knocked out using Levels.

For my 100x Motion project.

Have a great weekend everyone :)

Thank you for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image (please don't fall over). Happy 100x :)

Tags:   100 x: The 2021 Edition 100x:2021 Image 11/100 wobbly zoom blur twizzle LEDs lightpainting spiral galaxy

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Firework ICM.

Taking good pictures of fireworks seems to be a mix of experience and luck. Experience helps with the point of view, the focus and the shutter speed. But the rest is down to luck in the timing and the weather.

Often in a 20 or 30-minute display I'd be happy to get half a dozen good images. Because fireworks images often have very little visual context, even if you get lucky, your image is not going to look much more interesting than the others published on sites like Flickr.

So in a vain attempt to increase the interestingness, the last time there was a local show (October 2019!) I tried wiggling the camera while taking some shots.

How interesting they turned out to be.

I guess it's really light painting using fireworks as the light source, but it certainly bumped up the "successful" shot rate. Mind you I think firework ICMs are rather a niche spectator sport compared to the classic approach, so I doubt my standing as a photographer has improved as a result. But it proved fun, which is the main thing for me.

I hope you enjoy this one anyway. It's a single exposure. Often the interestingness came from the transition between fireworks which is kind of the opposite of the requirement for the classic approach. Varying the movement over the exposure was also good fun.

Sadly because this was taken in 2019 it doesn't qualify for my motion 100x project where I am woefully behind once more...

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

Tags:   Abstract insubstantial art Design flame metaphor Smoke Fractal wave head effect luminescence Surreal Background illustration desktop science wallpaper Pattern Texture fire firework ICM intentional camera movement

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So, what is it?

No, you’re not meant to look at the tags, that’s cheating. Besides I’ve posted one of these before so you already have a clue!

This sort of thing produces some very interesting results. The basic approach is to manually focus the camera on a suitable distant target (near but not at infinity) and set the camera to Bulb mode or equivalent, so you open the shutter by pressing the button and close it when you release.

Wait for something to happen and then wiggle the camera. When something stops happening release the shutter. Repeat. A hundred or so times...

You may need to check the aperture and ISO settings to make sure you are recording light somehow, and also keep checking the results for focus as it’s easy to knock it off accidentally.

Every November in Britain we have a national festival where we commemorate an attempt some four hundred-odd years ago to blow up parliament. We do so with aerial (and other) displays of pyrotechnics.

Each year our village hosts one of the larger local displays, free for all with donations for charity. We tend to watch from the upper rooms of our home and, as a mark of our bourgeois decadence, we are usually equipped with glasses of wine (we tend to be eating the evening meal when the aerial stuff goes off).

This was taken during the last display in 2019. Bored and frustrated with the pursuit of capturing the ideal starburst, I started wiggling the camera… just to see what happened. Well what fun. Serendipity is still the queen of the results, but there are some interesting effects...

I’ve always found it amusing that as the society that invented parliamentary democracy that is the model for so many others worldwide we have buried deep within our corporate psyche the desire to blow up the very thing.

And the celebration of the last attempt involves every level of society and every political persuasion. The consensus is that if we blow the whole lot up and start again there would be a net benefit...Such is the deep irony that pervades our nation :)

And I am so grateful that I can say that sort of thing in a public forum without fear of being sent to some Stalag or Gulag or even the Tower dungeon.

Hang on… there’s someone knocking at the front door; I’ll go and see who it is - I’ll be back in a mo’...

...

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

Tags:   desktop beautiful Closeup Abstract insubstantial color Texture no person one nature Motion invertebrate art shape bright ocean Pattern image Design close dance firework intentional camera movement ICM display light painting

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