Much of my photography is of the greater landscape and I’m often trying to present sweeping vistas with sharp detail.  However, I also like to photograph more intimate scenes and abstracts.  One of my favorite abstract techniques is motion blur.  This can be achieved a few different ways and is a particularly good technique for emphasizing leading lines in a photo while smoothing out distracting elements.  The final result can often look more like a painting than a photograph.

I really like to use motion blur with trees that have staight trunks.  The technique is more an art than a science, so a lot of experimentation and throw away images are required to get something that I like.  I start by setting a relatively slow shutter speed and making a vertical pan (movement) with my camera.  I have found that shutter speeds between 1/4 of a second and 1/20 of  a second work best.  I move the camera up or down, in as straight a line as possible and depress the shutter release as the camera is moving.  At slower shutter speeds I pan slower and at faster shutter speeds I pan faster.  It is hard to know exactly what will be in the frame so I repeat the process over and over so that I will have many images to select from.  Panning the camera while it is on a tripod can help keep the motion steady and smooth, but also limits flexibility.

Physically panning the camera is often all I need to do to achieve the abstract look I’m going for.  Other times I selectively add more blur by using the Motion Blur filter in Photoshop (Filter>Blur>Motion Blur).  To do this I’ll create a duplicate layer of the background image and blur the duplicate.  Then I’ll add a layer mask to the blurred layer and paint with a black brush on the mask to bring through any detail from the original image that I want to keep.  This digital blurring technique can also be applied to images that were taken in focus without panning the camera.  Digital blurring often takes just as much trial and error as panning the camera.

Several of my favorite photographers have used these techniques to create some wonderful abstract images, including Jesse Spear, Eddie Soloway and William Niel.

From a trip to the southern Oregon coast with a group of Ashland photographers a couple of weeks ago.  I liked the barnacle patterns on this rock and spent some time working on longer exposures to capture some wave motion for an interesting middle ground.  As many of us who like to capture wave motion in our ocean photos well know, it is hard to get in the right position and still stay dry.  I ended up stranded on this rock for several wave cycles until the surf went back out enough for me to wade to shore…the surf here wasn’t dangerous, just wet.

On the hike back to the car a woman approached me on the beach and said, “are you Sean Bagshaw?”  I immediately wondered what I was in trouble for.  It turns out she was with someone in the group.  I had wandered off for quite a while and they were ready to go.  Since she was walking my way they asked her to have me get a move on.  Apparently they had told her I would be easy to spot because I would be carrying a tripod and most likely be wet up to the waist.  I hate being so predictable.

Canon 5D, 16-35mm f/2.8 L @ 28mm, 2 sec @ f/18 and ISO 50, 3 stop ND filter for longer exposure time.

This amazing location required a 4:00 AM wake-up and a cross country hike through grizzly country in the dark up on Logan Pass in Glacier National Park. It was well worth the effort. Streams cascading off all sides of a bowl shaped valley converge at this narrow slot in the rocks. During the summer, melt water flows off the canyon walls in several places creating four of five separate falls, but in the fall just the two main falls remain.

I first became aware of this waterfall from Galen Rowell’s classic photograph.  A couple of years ago it ran on the cover of Outdoor Photographer Magazine and included the following caption: “Light conditions like this are notoriously difficult to photograph.  The contrast between the sky and the shadowed ground is too much for film or an image sensor to handle.  At the time Rowell made this image, he used a split neutral-density filter to control the contrast.  If he was alive and photographing the same scene today, Rowell would have used a digital camera.  He’d have known that he could employ some sophisticated RAW-software techniques to double-process the image file.”

I took that advice and photographed the classic scene in two separate exposures, one for the sky and one for the dark foreground and then manually blended the two images in Photoshop to allow the entire range of light that I experienced to all be contained within a single image.

The magazine caption also noted the irony that in a location famous for being on the continental divide, a place where water usually flows in opposite directions, toward the east or the west, would also be a place where so many streams flow together.

Two exposure manual blend. Canon EOS 5D, Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 lens, 3 stop Sing-Ray split neutral density filter, circular polarizer, 3.2 sec @ f/10 (sky), 15 sec @ f/10 (fore ground), ISO 100