I find fun in photography because it gives me an opportunity to express the creative part of who I am, both with the lens and with Lightroom. Two funny things happened between my ears as I was contemplating this challenge. The first is that I had to look up what constitutes abstract photography, and the second is that as I looked through this year's files of my visits to the Naples Botanical Garden this year I realized that many of the photos I used in my posts were abstracts.
As soon as I saw the theme this week, I knew I wanted to use this first photo. The story behind it is that the cafe in the garden had a display of several large pictures done in different colors. I couldn't tell if they were painted or done digitally but they intrigued me. Consequently I took a couple of photos of the tree trunk earlier in the year to use whenever. I didn't crop it in the frame of my lens because I didn't have a long enough lens and couldn't walk close enough to use a macro lens. I have a lot of fun finding interesting ways of postprocess cropping of photos to express the emotions elicited in me by the subject and to make an image esthetically pleasing. My eyes are busy as I look at this photo - probably because there are so many focal points and they are all pointing in slightly different directions. It feels whimsical, even.
This next photo is my favorite of the week. It is of two aloe plants, a blue one in front of a yellow-green one. After cropping, I only did some postprocessing to intensify what was already there. I love the range of colors, both warm and cool. I also love the subtlety of lighting (hard to identify where light is coming from) and shadows (can you see them?) that creates a desire to explore the photo for answers. I'm going to see if this one will print well.
These two leaves were in the undergrowth of several large trees and there wasn't much color around them - mostly green foliage, no flowers. They didn't seem real to me, instead looking like two fake leaves that were painted in a abstract. You can decide if they are real made to look abstract, or abstract made to look real.
This last photo was taken to be an abstract, in fact I took photos of this large leaf on two different trips. I did a little cropping to get it centered and straight in the frame, also a little tone adjustment for highlights and shadow.
A nice photo but not what I would find esthetically pleasing hanging on a wall. As I started playing with it for this post, I did additional cropping so lines moved from bottom left and used a filter to add subtle warm color to it.
It doesn't seem to me that there are right and wrong ways of doing abstract, so I would really appreciate any ideas you would have for making my photos more interesting. What would you do if they were yours? If you would like any of the originals to play around with, just let me know in the comments (along with file format you prefer).
Thank you, Ritva, for this fun challenge. I urge you to visit her blog here to see her wonderful photos that she used to stimulate our creative juices and I hope you will post some of your favorite abstract photos for us to learn from.
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