Dawn (Patreon)

I was surprised by the amount of positive interest I received when I posted this image to social media last week. It was my first morning on the beach after travelling north to Tropical Far North Queensland to escape the winter down south (and, as it turns out, an unexpected COVID 19 lockdown in my home city of Melbourne).

The image was captured hand-held by panning the camera with a slow shutter speed: 1/4 Second at f/16, ISO 50. Without fine detail the image is reduced to a composition of color series and a simple stack of geometric shapes. No detail for the viewers eye to latch onto.

Sometimes it is important to take time out, time out from producing pin-sharp images and take the opportunity to play or be creative.

A few years back I created a series of abstract images I titled '2-seconds in Suburbia'. I used a 10-stop ND filter and made a point of only taking images while moving - be it walking or travelling on escalators. Periodically I revisit this need to play.

This 2-second exposure was the first in the series and was captured from the train window on my way to RMIT University (where I was a senior lecturer for some 14 years).

With this type of experimentation you will undoubtedly capture lots of rejects but occasionally, with a little post production, you can create something some people may want to hang on their wall.

When coloured light is mixed, using long exposures and camera movement, you can expect the saturation and contrast will drop. But these can be restored by program like Lightroom in just a matter of seconds.

A word of warning - if you capture long exposures at f/16 expect any dust spots you have sitting on your sensor to come into sharp focus. Time to get out that Rocket blower :-)