karen maze photoblog

I’ve been really into this Diana Lens I picked up recently. I got a 38mm lens and a Nikon mount, so I could put it on my Nikon D700 DSLR - and it is so much fun. Sure, it isn’t really Lomography, but it gives me the flexibility I’m used to, with an added element of fun.

There are many different Lomography cameras. The Diana lens, as you might expect, is usually found on a Diana camera, which is a medium format film camera made almost entirely of plastic - that includes the lens. Here’s Tuna with his special edition Tokyo Rising Diana:

Tuna and his Tokyo Rising Diana

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Last weekend, the two of us drove out to Joshua Tree. We’ve been talking about doing a “Painting With Light” project out there for a long time. If you’re not familiar with the technique, during a long exposure, you use a light source (usually a flashlight, strobe or speedlite) to add to the ambient exposure. You really get the feeling of “painting” when you use a flashlight, because you end up applying using a brushing motion to add light more to certain areas than others, according to your artistic license. It’s a really fun technique - and one I hadn’t done since taking photography classes at Santa Monica College about 8 years ago. We learned a lot on our first outing…

• We”ll be bringing additional flashlights on our next trip. As it was, only one of us could be painting.
• Also, a stop watch. Or just a watch…our “One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand” method of counting out the exposure length was woefully inaccurate, as the EXIF data later revealed.
• Gloves. It gets colder than you think out there.

The results of our efforts are below. I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as we enjoyed taking them. I can’t wait to get out there again soon.

We chose the exposure we wanted for the moonlight and sky, then selectively painted in the foreground with our flashlight. Some post production in Adobe Lightroom.

This was a much longer exposure than the photo above - almost 6 minutes. Just a kiss from the flashlight during the exposure adds extra detail in the tree.

Nothing fancy here. A straightforward silhouette against the desert sky.

It's hard to resist that desert sky.

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-km

but it was an acquired taste.

Most of the time, I’m something of a sharpness freak. Soft images make me crazy…absolutely nutso! That’s because softness often robs what might otherwise be a great photo of its power, its “wow factor.” The eye hunts for the sharpest point in the photo. If it has to hunt too long, or isn’t satisfied when it gets there, it’s a fail. In some cases, another element in the photo can be so powerful that the softness is not a distraction. Phew! But squeaking by on what, to me, amounts to a technicality is not the goal. Unless, that is, I’m in a situation where I can embrace the blur.

For me, this idea was born of laziness. It had gotten dark and the tripod was all the way back in the trunk of my car. I’m no heart surgeon. There’s no way I am going to get sharp images hand-held at 1/30. So I blurred the heck out of the images. I spun. I shook. I practiced my triple toe loop. And I got some images I like a lot. So much, that I started doing it even when I didn’t have to.

There’s a bigger issue at play here: Intention. It’s probably the most important element of commercial and fine art. Did you mean to do that? Heck yes! Think about why you chose to do what you did. There’s a reason, even if you weren’t aware of it at the time.

Blur is just one of the tools available to communicate with your viewer. In the case of seascapes (#1 & #3), it emphasizes the line and color. Each element of the scene flows indistinguishably into the next, like the sound of waves lapping onto the shore. It’s peaceful, serene, other-worldly. Sometimes, as in photo #2, I like to make the image completely abstract (it’s sky and sunlit ocean peeking through through the pylons under Santa Monica Pier, btw) .

In the case of the beach with mountains photo (#5), I was interested in the mood and didn’t want to get caught up in the details that can keep our minds looking, guessing, racing (is that girl too deep in the water? Where is her mother? I hope she’s wearing sun screen. What’s up with that guy’s hat?). It’s not about the people as individuals, or even that moment in time. It’s about the feeling of spending time on a beautiful beach.

For Christmas is a Blur (#6), I broke out my Lensbabies 2.0. I was interested in capturing a unique Christmas image that captured what, for me, represents the spirit of the season without being too literal.

Do you blur? I’d love to see your intentionally blurry pics. Put links in your comments below.

Ebb & Flow

Light vs. Dark

Awash

Into the Light

Beautiful Day

Christmas is a Blur

-km