A couple of weeks ago I went for a walk in the woods with my wife. Usually, on such occasions I take a camera with me because you never know what is going to cross your path. This time I wanted to experiment with slower shutter speeds while moving the camera. I was inspired by some photographs showing blurry trees in a kind of abstract manner. So I looked for some nice tall trees and went into action moving the camera upwards while depressing the shutter button. After the development of the film I was a little disappointed about the results because in none of the pictures you could really recognize trees or the forest, etc. Maybe my shutter speed was too slow. But sometimes, on second thought, things change. Actually I liked the picture. It looked kind of cool to me and it reminded me of the illustration of fire in several older paintings. So I decided to keep the frame. As a jazz musician I certainly always have to deal with things evolving differently than originally planned. Everybody who improvises music knows about this and deals with it. As this is true for all kinds of improvisation in all the different areas of life, why shouldn’t it be applicable to photography?
About the Shot
The picture was taken with my new favorite camera, the Pentax 6x7 with the 105mm f2.4 lens on Ilford HP5+. The shutter speed was 1/60th of a second, unfortunately I cannot remember the aperture. I developed the film in Rodinal and used the Canon EOS 700D and a macro lens for scanning the negatives using Lightroom for post processing.