Painting with Light and Color

I love creating a peaceful, calm, and slightly surreal atmosphere in my photographs.

To achieve this, I usually use the long exposure technique with a minimalist approach.

In addition to that, I also enjoy shooting photos with a surreal and abstract feel.

ICM (Intentional Camera Movement) photography is one of the techniques I use for this. By intentionally moving your camera during the exposure, you can make abstract, surreal, twisted, blurry, painterly images.

Some photographers describe this technique as “painting with light and color”…

In my opinion, compositions with vibrant, contrasting colors make the image much more impactful. That’s why my personal favorites are spring and autumn nature landscapes.

This technique is actually quite simple, but it took me some time to master managing my hand movements and shutter speed to get the results I wanted. It requires a lot of experimentation. Over time, I managed to find that balance and started getting both beautiful and unique results.

Today, I’d like to share a few tips about this technique for anyone who’s interested.

When using this technique, you’ll generally need a shutter speed between ½ second and 3 seconds. It’s important to adjust your exposure accordingly to avoid blown-out highlights and color explosions. Since we’re not aiming for sharpness in these photos, you can use the narrowest aperture values in this technique — the ones I almost never use or recommend in regular landscape photography. If that’s not enough, or if you prefer a wider aperture, you can control the exposure using an ND filter. Don’t forget to keep your ISO low.

I also recommend focusing manually (set focus first, then switch to manual mode) and turning off your lens’s image stabilization/vibration reduction.

Once you’ve set everything up, all that’s left is to move the camera — vertically, horizontally, diagonally, in circles, or by zooming in and out — according to your composition.

Here are a few photos I took using this technique in autumn and spring forest scenes and tulip gardens.

See you in my next post…