ICM Photography Part III

It’s been quite a while (years, in fact) since I put up a ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) post. I still get around to shooting ICM subjects in my native Sydney, but there have been a few subjects that have eluded me over the years. Let’s get into it.

The Museum of Contemporary Art. The jacarandas in the foreground really make it.

This is the Museum of Contemporary Art as seen from the Cahill Walk. I have had this image in my mind for quite a while, but I needed to wait until jacaranda season to make it work. During this time, you’ll find pops of purple all over Sydney thanks to these trees, and these ones in particular just happen to sit below the walkway and perfectly work as foreground to the museum and Sydney Harbour Bridge beyond. For the tourists among you, the Cahill Walk is the perfect way to get away from the crowds at Circular Quay and get a better vantage point of the harbour. Simply use the elevator at the end of the Circular Quay.

The warm colour of the sandstone works well with the purple of the jacarandas, I think. There’s also a nice sense of movement in the image. And who can argue with something as iconic as the Harbour Bridge in the background. Overall, it’s become one of my favourite ICM images to date. Check out this image to see how this vantage point looks without the movement.

Bondi Icebergs Ocean Pool. There are few places in Sydney as iconic, but this image has eluded me time and time again.

The equally famous Icebergs ocean pool at Bondi Beach is a subject I must have tried to shoot three times using ICM, always looking ridiculous shaking my camera ’round up top at the viewing spot. I just could never get it to quite work, so this time I really thought about how I would frame the composition. I wanted the blues of the pool to be very punchy surrounded by the wash of the ocean. The lifeguard in the bottom right is also a neat touch.

Afterwards, my son and I walked down and went for a swim. I’ve lived in Sydney almost all my life but have never actually swum in this pool. There’s something about it—doing laps in the sun (or storm, as it was this day), Bondi beach busy and lively. I know it’s very touristy, but if you’re in Sydney I’d highly recommended dropping in for a quick dip. Being a public pool, entry is reasonably cheap.

Sydney Town Hall. Another elusive location.

Recently, I discussed trading in my Fujifilm GFX50R for the Fujifilm XT5. These next ICM images were taken with that camera. What I have noticed is you have to be a bit more careful with the XT5 files, especially given the post-production abuse I level upon them making these images. Go too hard and banding and artefacts start to become visible. That said, the results are still great, plus it’s so much easier to get around the city with a smaller camera.

I’ve tried many different compositions of Town Hall in the centre of Sydney but could never really get it working the way I wanted. Recently, I tried again and think I got it. There’s a jacaranda tree and something undetermined in the bottom right, the movement enough but not overboard and the colours pleasing. It’s fairly heavy (dark) tonally in the bottom corner, but I kind of like that, as if someone really slathered on the paint there.

Saint Mary’s Cathedral. Quite a departure from my regular ICM style.

While I was out, I also swung by Saint Mary’s Cathedral on the other side of the city—another icon. I had also tried to shoot this a few times with no success and came to it a bit more prepared. There’s a long water feature across from the cathedral that is great for reelections, so I used this to eliminate some of the busy foreground. As always, I was using shutter speeds between half a second to two seconds, really trying everything terms of moving the camera with the ND filter in place (rather, holding it in front of the lens given I don’t have an adapter yet).

During processing, it looked good but wasn’t quite working until I dropped it into Silver Efex. The result was an extremely dark, almost haunting image that looked like washy watercolour or charcoal. I debated if it was too far or maybe too different from my other ICM images, but ultimately I’ve decided to keep it in, as I quite like the look. Although it looks extremely inky, there is detail in there at 100%.

All this to say I think I’m running out of subjects in Sydney for ICM. If you have any ideas, please let me know and I’ll do my best to accommodate.

ICM Photography Part II

It’s been a while since I updated everyone on how my ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) is coming along, so here we go. It’s slow going. I’ll take a hundred shots and not use a single one. Sometimes processing with take ten minutes, sometimes ten hours. But it is nothing if not rewarding.

I had been envisioning this image for quite a while, but it took me two or three trips to get just right. This is looking towards the Harbour Bridge in Sydney from the Circular Quay Ferry Terminal. You can see the red and white pylon marker on the left, the iconic yellow and green of the ferry to the upper right. What I like most is the texture, which comes across as a mix between pencil and watercolour.

All of my ICM images to date have featured Sydney. I’ve tried not to rush it and focus on the really iconic parts of the harbour city. It really is a trial and error process, and I’ve come to learn there is actually a lot of technique to the initial capture. It is all about the movement of your wrist motion—the speed, amount of push and pull, spin… It’s not just shaking your camera around in the air, though that can also lead to a good result from time to time. Experimentation is key.

A GIF showing the build-up of this image in post-processing. It’s quite layer intensive, as you can see.

The other important element to making ICM work is to have a defined idea of not only what you want to shoot, but some idea of the composition. I find if I show up somewhere without having thought it through it leads to a scattered approach that doesn’t have a strong sense of composition, which is everything with images like this. At the least, you need a vague idea of where major focal points will be placed in the image before you ‘shoot’.

The Queen Victoria Building in Sydney. You can see the façade of the building in the back, the statue of Queen Victoria to the left and one of Sydney’s new trams moving through the bottom of the image.

I feel like I’m starting to get my own feel as far as ICM images go. Something that has started to change is my use of colour. I’m pushing saturated colour far more than my original images, as you can see in the image of the QVB building above. I’m a big fan of paintings featured strong, vibrant colours, so I expect to see that filter through to my ICM photography as I start to improve and get more confident.

The famous Coca Cola sign at Kings Cross, Sydney. This one took a long time to put together over several weeks and was originally different colours completely, though I felt they made it hard to gauge the subject matter.

Things don’t always go to plan. I had this image in my head of looking up the road towards the Coca Cola sign at Kings Cross, now something of a historic monument, but when I got there I found there were too many trees and clutter obstructing the view, so I had to get much closer than planned. In the end it worked out, as above, but it was certainly frustrating at the time.

Hours and hours spent in Photoshop were required to get this particular image working. Sometimes when you’re not feeling something the best thing to do is simply walk away, which I did… several times over several weeks.

One final piece of advice, for the love of god make sure you correct for dust on the base image before duplicating it and playing around. I often get too excited and forget this basic first step. It means I end up with twenty layers in twenty different orientations and two specks of dust turning into two-hundred. Don’t be like me. Make sure you have a clean file to begin with.

I understand these images are not for everyone. They border on the truly abstract and venture far from traditional photography, but I’m enjoying myself, happy with the results and that should really be all that matters.