Exploring movement

Writing about my photos is predominantly an act of introspection and learning. And so, this write up is just for me. If you find it helpful let me know what works.

Today I'm writing up another set of photos from the workshop I've been attending with the RPS (see first write up) and mostly putting down my musings about having extra abstraction through movement in my photos.

The Beginning

This exploration really kicked-off as a look at the work of Olga Karlovac. But, even though her work and the workshop was the final spark needed to finally push myself to really try this out, the thought of adding movement into the photos has been fermenting in my brain for a while.

I am an incredibly geometry-driven photographer. I find it my comfort zone so the notions of deliberately going out and shooting with movement don't come naturally to me and actually caused me a great deal of anxiety as it feels like I might not get my clean geometric compositions.

"The greatest joy for me is geometry that means a structure."

- Henri Cartier Bresson

The photo above is one of the first film photos that really showed me the effect that a bit of blur can have done right. The movement here is subtle, but it adds the sense of nostalgia for me and so it enhances the seemingly 'old soul' feeling I get from the photo overall. We get some of that for free given it's black and white already.

I know my eye and it seems to have been passed down to me with some nostalgia built-in.

If I had to pin it down, the movement adds the sense that the photo isn't perfectly in focus, which, in my mind, for some reason, screams old and weathered lenses (whether it's accurate or not). The second reason I appreciate the motion blur here is because it adds to the abstraction away from real life by making things a bit more dreamlike and unsharp. We can't recall dreams well, and when we do they aren't sharp, certainly not for me. At best one element from a dream really sticks with me while everything else is just a blur. And so the movement, even just a little bit of it, really plays into that idea. I do remember looking at this photo and thinking:

I liked how having extra abstraction makes me feel.

Now, 3 years later, having had these thoughts for a while, I finally eased my need for geometry and went out to try and add a bit more movement to try and see what happens. The following is my introspection into the results.

The Photos

The following are the photos I decided to call the keepers from around 4 rolls of film shot with this experimentation in mind.

The above photos took me 2 walks to gather. Out of a 144 photos 6 keepers is a good yield rate.

If you care, most, if not all of these, were shot at F16 at 1/15th on Ilford HP5 and with my trusty 50mm lens.

Preserving structure

One interesting thing I found was that you can push images pretty far in the right circumstances with some camera movement and still get 'clear' images when it comes to readability.

Here we have a pretty ungodly amount of movement blur and yet it's clear that there's still a human in the mix. Our brains are great at spotting something like this and we can rely on them finding humans from pretty unclear shapes due to their large visual weight.

The things that work here with movement is that it complements the geometry of the rest of the scene. With the right movement, it seems that one can blend geometric compositions (the nice rectangular and semi-circle elements of the photo) with the ethereal and dreamlike quality added by the extra abstraction. And in some cases, such as the V chevrons at the top, it can even enhance the geometry of the scene; I believe these would be much less effective without the thickening effect that the movement gives.

Overall, when I shot this image, I felt that it will work. I was standing right across the gate and the person was contrasty enough against the background lighting. This gave me confidence that if I just get the right amount of movement along the vertical axis, I could probably get something like what the image ended up being.

Do I think it's a mind blowing image? No. But, it shows me that geometry can be respected while adding a pretty crazy amount of movement. I guess the question, and I guess the skill, is which direction of movement to pick.

Subject in a dream

I found panning to be a pretty vital bit of technique. The original image discussed in the beginning seemed to work so well because something was in focus while the rest of the world seemed off. And so, along with the direction of movement the next thing I found useful was to consider locking on to the subject or to some element in the image as I move.

This is not rocket science. Ask any racing event photographer and clearly this is something that has been done countless times for countless 'car sharp, background blurry' style photos. I think the catch here is that this technique seems to help me express this idea of dreamlike separation between key players in the dream and the disintegrating mess that is the rest of the backdrop.

Specifically, in the image above the motion seems to aid in decontextualising the subject and without seeing their sharper features and their seeming gaze into the camera, contrasted against this chaotic blurry mess, this wouldn't make me feel as much as it does now.

Another tiny detail that is worth pointing out is that the quality of the motion blur is pretty fun. It seems like it's wavy and I am not sure what made it be like that, but there's something to trying to just move the camera in more organic patterns for these shots, which is contrary to the previous image.

The above image also has this feeling of a subject in a disjoint world. Unlike the prior image, this seems to work with a much smaller amount of tracking on the subject.

I think this highlights that maybe the amount of blur actually doesn't matter as much as some notion of it's interaction with the subject. In this case it tracking them.

For example, what makes the above work for me is that the person seems to have their soul almost knocked out of them with the blur. Almost like their body froze, but 'the rest of them' carried on. It also helps that the blur direction is aligned with the road, helping add to the intentionality (which is actually not by accident).

To sum up, it seems like any amount of motion done in an intentional way and in particular in a way that adds dreamlike quality seems to be something I really enjoy. Seemingly these subject tracking shots are very effective at the latter.

About happy accidents

I find film photography brings many joys. One of which is the polishing of skill needed to avoid continuous disappointment that can beset one when getting into this form of photography, particularly in a chaotic discipline such as street. And just to say, for me there's still a lot of honing of intuition to be done with respect to this kind of style. Only when I can consistently get what I want on film will I feel satisfied.

That said, I found that...

Although 80% of the skill is at the helm of your camera, 20% of the skill is in the selection process.

It seem exceptionally true in this kind of movement-driven style. You take shots with intuition and intention, but really whether the quality of the blur will come out exactly as intended or whether it will negatively (or positively) surprise you, is not something you find out until 2 weeks later.

The work then begins at being able to assess with a critical eye whether the movement in the image actually added to the emotion or is just a wiggle of a camera.

The images you didn't pick say a lot about those you did.

So if you get a happy accident and blur just works exceptionally well where you didn't expect it, or if you end up discarding 90% of the images from a location because the blur wasn't enhancing your idea, that's very much part of 'the work' needed to get a good final product and in honing your eye so that you get less of the 'accidents' and more of the 'happy'. It feels obvious, but hey yo...

Haunted

Besides the dreamlike quality in my images, I really enjoy things being a bit on the sad and dark side. The same qualities of abstraction and movement seem to enhance this feeling of sadness or unease in my images.

Gosh, I really don't know what that says about me.

Here's an image that I think has a bit of ghastly quality about it.

So clearly the image is only blurry to a minor extent, but it's enough to create this idea of instability. I feel like trying to focus at the edges of the concrete at the bottom and seeing them being a tad bit blurry makes my eyes feel like I'm in some form of fight or flight response mode. This movement really got introduced by my hands shaking or some tiny bit of movement that was not intentional beyond the fact that I intentionally set a slow shutter speed and was expecting even still images to have a bit of hand shake.

Regarding the subjects, the stars of the show here are really 2 things. Firstly, the black human outline in the background clearly is a bit sinister to my eye.

Who are they? Why aren't they in the light? Are they hanging back? Why?

More strikingly in the image, the face of the subject in the middle is blurred to the extent where it acquires this ghostly quality.

To my eye she's clearly smirking, but without her moving and effectively anonymising her own features it wouldn't be as sinister.

So I guess an interesting difference in this image to the others is that I didn't make much effort to move at all, the subject moved themselves and this weird decontextualisation of their features added something I really like.

I think learning what kind of movements enhance what emotions - lifting of hands, head turns and tilts, running while looking at the camera - is key to making intentional use of this effect skillfully.

This though is one of those 'happy accidents' that I set myself up for. I was there and shot this image with a fairly good overall balance, but the blur happened to enhance the image just right to make it stand out and for me to end up liking it.

Old

Lastly, I want to talk about this image. Again the movement is subtle, but overall the image is similar to the image way back at the top of this post. There's just that bit of timeless nostalgia in it.

Let's get the basics out of the way. I took this image almost on instant on my way to work. I saw it coming as the person was walking and the trolleys caught my eye so the combination of the two was a shoot trigger.The person is interesting and given they are wearing some form of semi-formal clothing, plus the fact that they are carrying a leather briefcase is giving them that extra boost in the nostalgia factor (not everyone carries a briefcase nowadays). The upside down trolleys definitely juxtapose against this semi-formal aesthetic of the subject by looking completely out of place.

When it comes to the movement in the image, again we have a bit of luck here, but also a lot of subtlety.

The overall image was pretty stable and so the actual movement in non-critical parts of the image is pretty similar to that top image and the image with the subject looking down in the previous section. But given the absence of the semi-haunting imagery, the same anxious feeling of fight or flight doesn't really hit me. Instead the unsharpness here accentuates the outfit of the person and adds a bit more timelessness, in a similar way to the top image which sparked this interest in movement in the first place. The same unsharp lens effect is likely a strong contributor to this feeling and actually in both images the subjects are wearing clothes that aren't worn as standard in the modern world, so there's something to mull over there.

I will say that although I saw the trolley and the whole relationship it had with the person while I shot, I didn't fully process the fact that the trolleys are stacked. And so what's fun here is that they look blurred in a different direction and a much bigger amount than the rest of the subtle blur.

Closing thoughts

Perhaps the conclusion here is actually that some emotions under movement get amplified if the movement is small and doesn't accentuate the geometry of a scene. So far the two categories of emotion that seem to benefit here are haunted and timeless, which are both qualities I love in my images (maybe I amplify them and not the other way around).

In the first image in this new batch we looked at the movement was extreme to the point of really making the image about the overall geometry and tonality rather than anything else while still making human figures manageable to distinguish.

The other take away that actually moving with the subject and using the difference in blur strengths is another effective way to add a bit of dreamlike quality as well as isolating the subjects a bit more.

Overall, writing this post mostly helped me think about my own images a bit more and helped me understand what appeals to me in the images a bit better. The real work begins now with me trying to apply these introspections to future work.

- Art