Methods of Creating Blur

At the stroke of midnight last night I counted 240 ±5 submissions for the 'Blur' call-for-work (it's tough and time-consuming to count the number more accurately, for any number of reasons), and so far I've whittled it down to about 60 ±3 finalists. My seat-o'-the-pants feeling about it is that both these numbers are about double the usual, or almost. So this one is going to be tough for me to edit. Well, I guess they all are.

Many people are competing against only a handful of others. For instance, the birdwing-blur people are going to be competing against each other, and the out-of-focus abstract entries will probably be vying for one place in the final 13, and all the bicycle-panning-shot people will be competing against each other as well, most likely. So it goes in contests or in juried shows. With a final set of thirteen, you can't give everyone their due.

In a quick survey, I notice all of the following methods of creating blur: subject motion and camera shake, obviously, including intentional camera shake using deliberate motions; bokeh; deliberate overall out-of-focus; long exposures; long lens scenes through shimmering heat, called refraction; panning shots; flare; the deliberate use of very poor or broken lenses; double or multiple exposures; diffraction; software computational effects such as the iPhone's "Portrait" setting; pictures through frosted, fogged, or wet glass; pictures through multiple windows or panes of glass; soft-focus filters; soft-focus lenses (see illustration below); changing lighting effects, as at a stage show; pinhole images; blur of various types added in Photoshop; multiple images added in layers in Photoshop; pictures taken through dense foliage; and an intriguing picture taken in near-darkness in order to excite extreme sensor noise. Of course, there are many pictures in which two or more of these techniques are combined. And I'm sure I've missed a few!

Bruce Hemingway, My Window. Photographed with the very rare
75mm ƒ/3 Pinkham & Smith Visual Quality Motion Picture lens.

One of the most unusual is a picture of a face seen through a translucent pancake of some sort being flipped in the air from a frying pan! Never seen that before. In fact that's one of a special little category of pictures that are very interesting because of the explanation of what they are or how they were made; I'm thinking of creating a separate post for those. My sense is that there are about five of them, maybe six. (Is it fair to add those to the running for the prizes? I think not, because that wasn't the deal that I announced. Contests are rough when you're not a rule-bound sort of person, as I am not. Because having rules and following them generally enhance fairness, whereas extemporizing can seem like changing the rules in mid-course.)

More soon,

Mike

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Comments

[Tom Passin]

One blur method you didn't list but that I've gotten interesting results with is to zoom in or out (with a variable zoom lens) during the exposure. I think this would work better with manual zoom vs electric zoom.

[Benjamin Marks]

Can't wait to see your picks/pix. I'd venture the blanket statement that in general, and since the dawn of photography, the default use of lens has been to create images that were in focus. But because of that (or, assuming that) almost every well-done picture that is blurry can teach us something, surprise us, show us something we haven't seen before. And that's the value of these contests to me: we get a curated group of images from folks whose work we'd never know otherwise. Feels like the night before Christmas to me.

[Bruce Bordner]

I'd be very interested in any "honorable mention" collections. Can you put these on your Flickr account, or do you worry about rights releases... I suppose we all gave you implicit permission to display all here. I am interested in all of the examples you mentioned.
Well, that makes your next month pretty easy to fill - images with endless discussion about how and why to make them.
Who cares about that Z8 stuff anyway (just bought my D850, so...) Tell us how to make pictures; that's becoming quite rare and you're good at it.

[Christer Almqvist]

Do you know of her? https://www.olga-karlovac-photography.com/site/