Twisted Sisters

— In one of the last assignments I had in my photography challenge group last year, we were asked to remain in one place for at least an hour and photograph whatever we could. The challenge was appropriately named “stuck in place.” Probably, that was the most valuable challenge in the year-long group.

The assignment was simple: pick any place and spend an hour making photos there. It was eye-opening for me to realize that my own creativity really grew after the first thirty minutes of “being stuck” in one location. Out of the forty-five photos I created, the one above was one of my favorites. Incidentally, the location I chose was our backyard here in Austin, Texas. I figured there would be enough interest there to keep me busy. I used a macro lens for some shots, but this one here was done with a zoom lens.

ICM, or intentional camera movement, is a fascinating experiment in photography. You need to have a certain idea in mind of what a normal scene can generate as you move your camera. In reality, though, you never know what the result will be. That is the beauty of ICM for me. The more you practice, the more you learn to see these patterns in nature. To obtain an ICM image, you can move your camera in any direction you please. It is also very important to use a low shutter speed in order to capture the motion. For the photo here, I used 1/10 second. If you are curious about what that is without the blur, it is the bottom portion of three trunks of a Yaupon holly tree.