Wild Teasel

A tech­nique pho­tog­ra­phers some­times use to cre­ate a more abstract ren­di­tion of a land­scape is “inten­tion­al cam­era move­ment”, abbre­vi­at­ed as ICM. It’s a fun, and most­ly unpre­dictable, way to exper­i­ment and see the land­scape differently.

This pho­to was not cre­at­ed using ICM, but was kin­da the inverse of that. In this case, rather than mov­ing the cam­era inten­tion­al­ly, I went out on a very windy day, locked the cam­era down on my tri­pod, and let the wind cre­ate the movement.

I chose a group of com­mon teasel as my sub­ject. The wind was real­ly blow­ing hard and swirling in all direc­tions; seem­ing­ly blow­ing every­thing, every­where, all at once. The teasel plants were about six feet tall, with their bristly seed heads on top, and their motion in the wind was any­thing but predictable.

As I tried to decide where to focus my cam­era, the absur­di­ty of wor­ry­ing about a focus point dawned on me since what­ev­er result I would get would be blurred any­way. I was using a medi­um-length zoom lens and final­ly decid­ed to focus on an indi­vid­ual plant that was just off-cen­ter of the com­po­si­tion; that would help keep the dis­tant back­ground out of focus too. I exper­i­ment­ed with the cam­era set­tings; my final set­tings for this pho­to were 156 mm, f/9.0, 0.5 sec, and ISO 200. Of course, the wind was its own vari­able, and I had no con­trol over what it did. Of about 150 images made over 45 min­utes, there were only a cou­ple that I liked, this being one of them.

As WinCity Voices con­trib­u­tor Adra Fisher has remind­ed us in her writ­ings, we should be hav­ing fun with our art. I had fun.