Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Seeing Anywhere (w/iPhoneography)

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I started this morning reading a quote from Ernst Hass,”The camera doesn’t make a bit of difference. All of them can record what you are seeing. But, you have to see “.

Later I was accompanying my wife and daughter to a clothing store. Not having much to look at myself, I started to see the palettes of color around me. Thinking of a new app, “Slow Shutter” (I had just loaded it on my iPhone), I decided to play with the colors around me and create color abstracts using iPhone pans and swipes.

This is what was there:

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The opening blog image and those that follow are what I “saw”.

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This next image was created from several black tops hanging on different color hangers. Again you can see what was there and then what I saw. Now you may say, how can one “see” those things? The answer is simply imagination, practice and experience. I  looked for pleasing color schemes, individual colors mixed with opposites, used oblique lines for more energy, etc.

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Was all I saw abstract colors? No. Here are a couple more images from that store visit. One indoors and the other out waiting in the truck.

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Blog images: As noted above the first images were all created using an iPhone with the “Slow Shutter” app. For the images here I varied the shutter speed from 1/4sec to 4sec. In some cases I just moved the camera up and down or along the dominant lines, in others, I would twist the camera while moving it forward or backward (with the  longer shutter speeds). I tried a variety of motions seeing what patterns I could create.

The last two images are straight shots using the standard iPhone camera app, the later being shot through a rain drenched window.