Painting With Light

Some of you have achieved a sim­ilar effect when you tried to cap­ture the pho­to­graph, but have missed the focus (rats!). Or (a rather few of you) have done it inten­tion­ally? Ah, let us not fool ourselves: we all do it non-intentionally because the mod­ern trend demands super-sharp auto­fo­cus right out of the cam­era box.

Even a few of you who know what this could be often­times pre­tend you did it on pur­pose, because in our every­day life we have no time for focus­ing “errors”. We aban­don pho­to­graphy and our cam­eras become trash imme­di­ately, because patience thins out too quickly today.
 
Recently I was play­ing with my lovely, koala-like-huggable manual focus­ing lens Viv­itar 28mm/2.8 CF [Close Focus] for Pentax and my K-7 digital DSLR. I cuddle this lens more and more for all cre­at­i­veish & unusu­al­ish aven­ues of photography.

By today’s stand­ards, it is a very old lens. And who on Earth cares about manual focus­ing? Pro­duced under Vivitar’s brand name by dif­fer­ent man­u­fac­tur­ers dur­ing the 1980’s, sev­eral series of sim­ilar lens designs have been intro­duced and sold for dif­fer­ent cam­era mounts, includ­ing Pentax’s K-mount SLRs. I have obtained it sev­eral months ago at a very afford­able $50 from the eBay. It is a real little treasure.

What fol­lows below is just a short series of cre­at­ive light pho­to­graphy I do for explor­a­tion of sub­jects, col­our shapes, light and con­trasts, which often­times can be ridicu­lously engaging. 

Believe me or ridicule me, this is the ABC of visual vocab­u­lary. Old mas­ters of art have done some­thing sim­ilar through the his­tory: they would observe their sub­jects and com­pos­i­tion from a dis­tance, fram­ing care­fully and squint­ing lightly not to be dis­trac­ted with unne­ces­sary details that would oth­er­wise steal atten­tion. Squint­ing pro­duces exactly the same effect in our eye­sight as this out of focus photography.

Such a method helps us “focus” on feel­ing, on what is really basic inside the pho­to­graph or the art piece: on shapes, col­ours, place­ments, pro­por­tions. It then adds a dreamy, express­ive over­lay as the chocol­ate top­ping. Such an over­lay can sel­dom be repeated using “con­ven­tional“, focused-in pho­to­graphy and which any­one can do, right?

In other words, throw the sharp focus point through the win­dow and explore fun­da­ment­als of pure art. Print your mas­ter­pieces as post­cards and send to your friends and rel­at­ives to tell them how sub­lime your new digital cam­era is. Hope they will believe you, as noth­ing beats the power of pho­to­graphy evidence. 

— Zvon­imir Tosic

Tagged as: blur, creative photography, lenses, travel photography, Walkabout