Unfocussed in the park by Mayank

Yes, thank you Herman. I enjoy Mayank's photographs very much.

As an aside, here...right now I've just gotten a new pair of glasses and as crazy as this might sound...some of Mayank's blurry photos really throw me off. Fortunately the blurriness doesn't bother me on my favorite which the 7th one of the street light.;)
 
Mayank, thanks for directing me to your 'Unfocussed' series. I like nearly all of them and probably only 3 don't work so well for me. The ones with lots of light seem to work best in my opinion. How did you get the "right" amount of blur so as to make them all uniform?
 
Christilou, thanks for your kind words. I looked for the right 'merger' or 'fusion' of elements and pressed the shutter only once that was visible on the camera lcd screen. Different amount of blurring had to be done for different subjects. You are right, this series was 'very difficult' to do. I had given up after my first effort as I could not achieve a pleasing merger of elements but learned on-the-go in subsequent shoots. Out of 100s of blurred photographs taken over many weeks (for Pink City: Unfocussed series), only 21 could be shortlisted for the show. After the hard work of shooting and processing, some images that looked good on computer screen were rejected after (expensive) prints were taken out as the blurs in them did not look good while hand-holding the prints. However, the series was also fun to do specially as I did not have to worry about camera shake or sharp focus or even megapixels, most of these images can be enlarged without sacrificing sharpness since there is none! The funny thing is that many people who came to the show wearing glasses ended up taking them off and said they liked the images with their normal blurred vision :) Some visitors simply stood in the middle of the exhibition hall and said they could see all the images 'clearly' from the same position :)

But thanks to the struggle, I seem to have got the hang of unfocussing photographs and 'Unfocussed in the Park' series was a breeze to do. The trick is to first choose a subject that offers a variety of elements (street works very well) and initially play with few elements in a composition. Blur more if there are many elements.

I would urge fellow photographers to try this technique. It teaches a lot in terms of inclusion or exclusion of elements in a photographic composition and how they relate to one another. It also challenges the notions of sharpness and resolution that many photographers today (including myself) are obsessed with!
 
Back
Top