These pictures show some of the kind of abstract photography I’ve been trying to do lately: nonrepresentational images found whole or as snippets of other photos whose composition, color, or other qualities resonate with me the way an abstract painting would. The first image is a crop of about one-sixteenth of the original, taken through a dirty windshield with a point-and-shoot camera zoomed out to the equivalent of 500 mm. The second image is a larger crop from an out-of-focus version of the same subject. Technically, both are all shot to hell. (Pun most emphatically intended.) Do the pixelation, luminance noise, etc., matter? In these cases, I’m not sure they do. What I’m trying (and mostly failing) to do is, I hope, sufficiently outside the realm of conventional photography to skirt that problem. But the flaws bother me nonetheless.
Art only for the web? Amateur failures posing as art? (The first shot I planned; the second was serendipitous.) Not art at all? The work of a wannabe painter? It’s quite possible that these images would lose the character I’m looking for if they were printed, with all their technical flaws more apparent. Therefore I prefer to find subjects I don’t have to crop, or crop so much, and to shoot under better conditions using better equipment. Lately I haven’t been able to get out much to do work. I hope that will change.
These are superb. I especially like the second shot.
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