Light Stalking

I was inclined to write something about this but thought better of it. I wondering what your thoughts are on the subject of abstract photography.

@tomdinning I rather like abstract photographs when done well. I think macro photography lends itself well to this and we sometimes have a tendency to limit our imaginations by what we know is the object of our photograph. I believe in abstract photography if we disassociate ourselves with what it is then we can let the elements and principles of art bring our photograph to a new dimension.

I agree with you about bringing a new dimension of thought and feeling with abstract photography. Right now, we are having a tropical thunderstorm, as we usually experience this time of year. Went to my backyard and started taking pictures of raindrops from the back porch ceiling.. probably because I am extremely sad about some news I just recieved. Here is one that I came out a bit interesting.. my lense is 18-135 mm. I thing I’m ready for the next one.. any thoughts would be welcomed.
Maybe too obvious for abstract photograhy….
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I like to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. Often when I shoot I see a pattern or a shape or a perspective that, on its own is just there, but if given a chance, can be turned into something entirely different.

It does seem easier with macro @drus. Maybe this is because we are not so used to seeing in this way and find it harder to recognise the subject.
Abstraction in art may be an easier concept to understand and achieve because of the ‘blank canvas’ approach. Some lines and colours from Mondrian or a few angles from Kandinsky are usually not mistaken for a landscape or a vase of flowers. They are without a doubt, abstractions: studies in light, line and colour.
But with a photograph, we know that it was ‘something’ beforehand. The landscape and the vase of flowers were real, so we might find the need to be grounded in identifying some aspects of the object in reality.
@keka has photographed a drop of water; there’s no mistake. And I’m sure most viewers spent some time trying to figure out the ‘object’ in my and @dres ‘s images – the feedback I have received elsewhere indicates that.
So, the question I would ask is: Does the inate nature of photography to depict ‘reality’ prevent us from viewing a photograph as abstract even if the intention of the photographer is to be abstractive?
Or are we destined to always have the question asked:
‘Is this grass?’

Maybe one has to step one extra step back to just enjoy abstraction in photos. I have been enyoying very much to follow this guy Hingo in his serie Moderu http://www.flickr.com/photos/haraldur_hingo/sets/72157626066835606/. I realy wonder sometimes how he makes his photos, but try not to see them as photos of things or figures. That has been a good process for me.

Good questions @tomdinning! Do we “expect” to be able to identify something in a photograph? Thinking “out of the box” and not within the frame, is that something that takes an effort to enjoy? Or is it perhaps one of those entities like HDR that once it breaks out, it creates a whole new movement? Great art is created by making people extend themselves into a realm they didn’t think they would find themselves, to be “taken away” to a different realm. So many modern artists were shunned as ridiculous when they produced their art, Pollack, Picasso, Miro or Dali, Kandinsky’s later works yet they challenged the bounds of what art is and began a whole new art movements. Is fine art photography ready?
Summer Sledding Hills

I think Paul @rangerpaul has the basic idea when he finds himself faced with ‘reality’ in the viewfinder and on closer inspection finds those line, colours and patterns that he can isolate from the scene purely on their interest or aethetic value and appeal.
That may be the advantage of photography: abstraction already exists; we just have to find it.
So what we do is not add lines, colours and shapes to the ‘canvas’, but subtract erroneous information from the scene until we have only that part we are interested in, not for what it is but for what it does.

The image below, for example, may be difficult to determine what it is but this is because enough information has been removed to make it almost clueless. So it becomes abstract in its meaning and now takes on a study of the lines and colours that make it up.

The question now arises: how much do you need to take away before it becomes abstract.
For example, on the same scale as the last one, is this considered abstract?

Its still recognisable but its at the point of no return where any more subtraction would render the image uninteresting.
Or even this:

where nothing physical has been removed but the image is mainly a study in line and form.
And finally those images which are strongly manipulated to subtract distracting detail such as this:

Maybe others can post their own personal concept of ABSTRACTION here.

You are right in that the abstraction already exists. Sometimes it is serendipitous, as in the first image I posted. That was cropped out of a larger image, and number two was an experiment in shutter speed, that appealed to me. I used both as jumping off points into the abstract. The second and third images were taken with creating an abstract in mind. Number three was happenstance, but when I saw the “subject”, I visualized the outcome, and I snapped it off with my point-and-shoot. Number four started out with the final image in mind. I set the shot up to achieve the pattern, perspective and lighting I wanted, and then used that as my canvas. I added an unconventional crop to number four to try and express a horizontal, dune-like quality. The crop shape of the first image was dictated by the shape of the object.

By the way, no-one has ever really seen these images. Would anyone mind viewing them on Flickr, in the Lightbox, and tell me if you think they “work”.

Do you have a link @rangerpaul?

@tomdinning…everything is a blank canvas. You think of abstraction in photography as taking something away, I think of it as putting something there that wasn’t….it’s the creative part of me. I see what I see and create from something that wasn’t, in photography it is a blank frame until I fill it, what my eyes see and mind imagines is what ends up inside the corners of it. I take my abstract photography as abstractions; I don’t crop to achieve them, only as in any other circumstances, to create a better composition.

I think the element of surreal should permeate any aspect of form in abstract a good example is this raw shot here link: http://romanseye.posterous.com/title-birds-stacks-them-for-the-future-from-t
http://romanseye.posterous.com/?page=8#
Also the title should evoke a form of abstract thought too…
title: Birds, stacks & them; for the future
From the degrees of fate study…
by: RomansEye Young •}~
Abstract Surreal Street photography etc
from: Street photography; Surreal/Abstract/Photography/Art

OOPS! I guess a link would help…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/56323079@N06/sets/72157626220236032/

My point about the blank canvas, Dru, was in relation to our starting point. It is possible for a painter, for example, to create a painting from a blank canvas with minimal input from any reality that exists. A photographer starts with the light dispersed, reflected or produced by things. Those things already exists and we select that part of it we wish to photograph. We fill out frame with what already exists.
Like dots on a half tone image in an old newspaper image the closer we get the less we are able to discern the subject matter until we reach a point where what we see is just dots of different sizes. Our brain does need a certain amount of information to process imagery; part of that information is context and content. When we reduce the context and content beyond the point of recognition we have abstraction.
Then the image can take on other meanings and that makes abstraction really interesting.
@romanseye – I wouldn’t confuse surreal images with abstract images. There are some aspects of each which they share but their function in an historical perspective is quite different.
It is still important to racognise the detail and subject matter in surreal images so that the viewer is able to determine the juxtaposition that the artist is suggesting. It may all seem a bit bizarre at first but the more bizarre the more surreal it appears.
No such juxtaposition exists intentionally in abstract images.

Okay, I can understand it from that perspective Tom, but everyone has “starting points” based in reality. The expressionism movement perhaps less so but I still think that you could find a Pollack-type scenario somewhere to photograph, if you wanted to but you’d lose the reasoning of the movement. There are many creative aspects to abstract photography really given the cameras settings, it could, if you wanted to think of it in that way be a blank canvas, adding to or subtracting from your “canvas.”
Dali or Miro are great examples of surrealism.

Some of my abstracts:

This is a macro shot of a seagull feather with a drop of water on it, converted to black and white.

I take a lot of shots like this, where the “subject” is off-centered with quite a bit of its surroundings included in the frame. These types of shots just appeal to me for some reason, I’ve never been able to put my finger on it…

Rust colors have also always appealed to me. Another example of my love of off-centered subjects.

I’ve taken a large number of abstract shots over the years. Abstract and Surreal used to be my favorite types of shots!