Abstract Flowers

Next time you find yourself in a garden or field of flowers, try some abstract blurs.  Take lots of images because most of them will be failures, but some will be really interesting.  Try a relatively slow shutter speed, may start experimenting around a 1/15 second and see what you get when you move the camera.  Try different movements, up and down, side to side, twist, and also try quickly zooming the lens during the exposure and see what you get.  Post them in the comments below, I'd love to see them.  Try it, it's fun!

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This images was made by twisting the zoom ring on the lens during the exposure.  When doing this technique, try to put a main subject in the center of the frame in the hopes of getting one flower in focus.  I didn't quite achieve that with these images but I have with sunflowers in the past.

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Same technique as image 1.

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Here I spun the camera.

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This was another zoom technique, this time I do have some flowers in focus and I love how it make the image feel sort of 3D.

Don't Forget to Enter Your Flower Images this Month

This Thursday is the deadline for this month's photo contest.  Click here to enter your flower images.  

I shot the images below at a new tulip garden in Situate, Rhode Island this spring.  In these images I was concentrating on a primary subject with a shallow depth of field for lots of background bokeh.  In the next few days, I'll post another series of tulip images where I was focused on create blurred abstracts.

Make Creative Compostions with this DIY Tilt Shift Lens

On this new web-serie we will focus only on the weird lenses , the old, the crazy ones that you can mount on a mirrorless camera. 

Paris-based photographer, Mathieu Stern is back again with another interesting lens experiment.

This time, he created “bokeh madness” by attaching a Russian Jupiter 9 85mm f/2 lens onto his Sony a7II using a M42-to-E tilt adapter.

The Jupiter lens can be purchased for about $100 to $150 on eBay, and has gotten glowing reviews for its image quality and affordability. The tilt lens adapter costs about $30 on eBay.

This is the second video in Stern’s ongoing Weird Lens Challenge series of videos.