Lens-Artists Challenge #318: Finding Beauty in Unexpected Places

Lens-Artists Challenge #318: Finding Beauty in Unexpected Places

This week it was Patti's turn, from P.A. Moed to host the Lens-Artists Challenge, and she chose 'Finding Beauty in Unexpected Places' (https://pilotfishblog.com/2024/09/28/lens-artists-challenge-318-finding-beauty-in-unexpected-places/) as the theme for the week. Patti asked us to look beyond beauty in 'its typical forms — a flower, a sunset, a full moon, a smiling baby' and look beyond 'the ideal concept of “what’s beautiful”'.

Readers of my previous Lens-Artists Challenge entries might have noted that I do like taking images of the mundane and trying to transform them into something different. This is not everyone's 'cup of tea', and in fact my partner is constantly bemoaning my attempts, but Patti has asked to 'surprise us with something that you find beautiful but other people might not', so here we go.

One of my favourite cameras at the moment is the Olympus Camedia C-100, a 1.3-megapixel point and shoot released by Olympus in 2001. What makes this one particularly special is that the sensor is failing. If you just point it at a subject the preview on the display screen is fine but when you take a photo it overexposes by about 10 stops, I reckon. It's great in low light, but in daylight you'll just see a blank white image ... unless you put a 10-stop neutral density filter in front of the lens, and then it works perfectly (sorry, 'perfectly' is doing some heavy lifting, here).

I took it out around the neighbourhood and it makes some wonderful trichromes and digital aerochromes. It's infrared response is really lovely, and of course you don't need to use the ND filter because the 720nm infrared filter has a 10-stop filter factor already. But what I also like doing is attempting extreme multiple exposure photography. I'm not talking about double exposures, but ten or more exposures stacked into the same image.

On one outing with the Camedia C-100 I thought, let's see what happens when you stack a load of frames of the same subject with this glitchy camera. Instead of staying in one position I thought it would be nice to walk around my favourite tree and well. I took several photos around the tree, Pep Ventosa style, then in GuIMP photo editor stacked them all into a single layered image. Then fiddling around with the blend mode and the opacity produced the image glow. I thought it came out rather well. 

Soon after we left for our annual holiday, which has already been presented in a couple of other Lens-Artists Challenges. When we go the the beach we have to walk through a lovely pine woodland. This year I brought along with me my full-spectrum Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ8. This is a little 12MP point and shoot camera from 2010 that I converted to full-spectrum myself. All this involves is removing the IR cut filter from in front of the sensor, which sounds easy but can be really fiddly with the wrong camera. Fortunately, the DMC-TZ8 is very straightforward to convert and with a 720nm Infrared filter can produce some lovely images. 

Like my favourite tree, I thought that it might be nice to make a few more image stacking experiments. This one was simply several images of a lonely tree taken as we made our way to the beach. I also thought it would be a good idea to try a digital aerochrome image stacking experiment, which I think would have worked much better with a symmetrical subject rather than the scrawny pine tree that I chose.

Of course, since I had the full-spectrum camera to hand it seemed only natural that I should take it further into the woods. Normally the pine woodland that we walk through is beautiful enough, you don’t have to look very far. But I always find that taking images in infrared always take its natural beauty to the next level — if that were possible. I'm never sure if it's the reflection of infrared wavelengths from the vegetation, turning the landscape a surreal white, or the lack of infrared in the sky resulting in a dark sky, but it never fails to surprise and delight me.

To finish off this entry I just thought I would include this infrared image from a few years ago, probably the year I converted the Panasonic DMC-TZ8 to full-spectrum. We were walking through the woods and I was trying to explain how the camera worked. I turned around to take a photograph as an example and as soon as I saw the I.age on the display screen I knew I'd never top that. And I don't think I ever have.

Themes for the Lens-Artists Challenge are posted each Saturday at 12:00 noon EST (which is 4pm, GMT) and anyone who wants to take part can post their images during the week. If you want to know more about the Challenge, details can be found here (https://photobyjohnbo.com/about-lens-artists/), and entries can be found on the WordPress reader using the tag 'Lens-Artists'.

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