Weekly Abstract and Experimental Thread #1 (3-24-2025)

The weekly Abstract and Experimental thread
This weekly thread, starting on a Tuesday, allows us to showcase our abstract and experimental photos and get some feedback.
Opening up discussions, not only on content, style, composition & techniques, but also on the creativity of the image.

It’s easy to participate
Post an image with a title and description. To make it easier to view in the forum, all comments should include the original title and at least one of the original images as a quote.

Thread Guidelines:
This weekly thread is for sharing and developing abstract and experimental photography skills.
We want to see wild, creative photography.
Give your entry a clear title and mention the technique used.
Provide constructive feedback on others’ images.
Try to go beyond simple praise or dismissal and explain why you like it, or what caught your eye.
”Likes” are encouraged too.
Negative feedback and suggestions are also OK (be polite, honest, and constructive).
Giving feedback is just as important as receiving feedback, both help to improve our artistic and technical skills.

What is an abstract or experimental photo?
Different ways to see and investigate the world around us. Abstract photography reduces a subject to shapes, tones or colors making it unrecognizable. Abstract subjects are everywhere.

Experimentation might include, Infrared, dragged shutter, zone plate, motion, 3D, fluorescence, multiple exposure, birefringence, ultra violet, optical including adapted lenses, tri color, fractals, manipulated Polaroids, pinhole, Kirlian (bioelectrography) and many other methods. Experimentation can be for artistic expression or pure science. It is often more difficult than standard types of photography. This is fine, we aren't expecting perfection. Every experiment enhances knowledge. Your idea can help others explore the universe around them. We love experimentation. You can explain your process or keep it a secret.

This will be a looser collection of photos compared to other weekly threads. This is good. It will be a place to get away from standard animals, babies & sunset photos. We don't hate animals, babies or sunsets. Show us your creative abstract and experimental images.

This is a photo using birefringence .It shows stresses in the plastic .A polarizing sheet was placed on top of a light table. The filter cases were placed on top of polarizing sheet and a 2nd polarizer was attached to the camera lens. No light table? Use a laptop computer screen set to a blank word document. Now you can use just one polarizer on the camera lens.

This whole thread is an experiment. If enough people participate it will remain weekly. If not, it may change to monthly. Beyond all else, have fun!

Thanks for starting this thread. We will see what members come up with.
I like messing around with intentional camera movement.

Trees in London.

Colours in water

Good idea to have a thread for abstracts !
Together with my daughter about 7 yeas ago, we did some expeiments, dropping acrylic paints into a water tank. My daughter chose the colours and poured them in artistically, while I merely clicked the shutter ;-)

I displayed a series of these, in the company where I work, printed big and framed, lit with spotlights from above. Was quite popular :-)

Here's two of them

Since the comment refers to the post immediately above, I won't quote the images, so as not to unnecessarily clutter the topic.
...................
I like colorful things and images in general, but the effect achieved by Fireplace33 is truly spectacular!👍

I'll experiment with something similar under slightly different conditions, to see what happens.😀

Details under magnifying glass

The idea is to reproduce the effect in the title, without using a real magnifying glass.
I initially used the method to amplify depth in stereoscopic images, but the effect can be interesting for "normal"/2D images as well.

I created the effect in Photoshop, and "the magnifying glass in the image" is for decorative purposes only.

Many thanks :-)
I forget to mention that it was a lot of fun playing in the garden on a summer's day with a water tank and some paints.
I can post some details of my setup for this, if you like

This would be really interesting to see.👍

Have you tried doing the experiment using other liquids?
It would be interesting to see what happens if other liquids are used, possibly layered, including water.😀

Well we tried mixing the acylic paint with water to make various thicknesses to pour in, and see what effect that had. But of course you can choose anything, that's all part of the fun :-)

Here's a description of the set up that I wrote back in 2017
Camera used was a Nikon D7100 + 16-80 lens + 2 flashes

The glass fish tank I used is 40 x 25 x 25cm and takes about 20 litres of fresh water.
Manually focussed on something placed in the middle of the tank, before filling it with water.
Found I got a good field of view at about 2m from the tank with 80mm FL. This mild telephoto FL setting allowed for a reasonably sized black panel to be placed about 1m behind the tank to give the out of focus black background I wanted.
The DOF calculator gave me an aperture of about F16 to get everything inside the tank easily in focus.

Since I was using 2 bright flashes I can set ISO to a minimum, and set SS to the max sync speed (1/200s) and then just adjust exposure with the power of the flashes. Two SB700’s were placed looking in, on the left and right side of the tank, controlled remotely from the camera’s built in flash, blocking the light from the built in flash to avoid any unwanted light from the front.

One big problem is all the reflections you get on the glass tank from everything else in the garden!!
Now, everyone knows that a pol filter will remove/reduce those reflections from a glass surface, right ?
...at least I thought it would, and so, armed with a pol filter I wanted to remove all those reflections on the side of the glass fish tank.
But the sad truth (of physics) is, that doesn’t work if you can see yourself and the camera in the glass, those reflections are just not removed, no matter how much you turn the polariser.
… because, when the angle of incidence is straight on, (like it is, if you can see yourself) then the light is not polarised as it is reflected, so a pol filter has no effect. However, if the light were coming in at an oblique angle to the glass from some object that you can see reflected, then it will be polarised and you can turn the pol filter and remove that more or less easily, but that just wasn’t my case here :-(
So for my fish tank, shooting straight in I removed the pol filter completely and just made the background behind me, and myself and the camera all as dark as possible with a huge black sheet hung up on a stand, to avoid all reflections as much as possible.

The acrylic paint was mixed with a little water to get the right consistency and poured in by my daughter while I fired several shot; choosing the best later.
Just some basic levels adustment were needed later in pp.
It’s amazing what intricate patterns you can get as the different coloured paints fall down and mix with each other and then spread out in the water. .
It only last a few seconds before the paint spreads out completely and it all becomes just a murky cloudy fluid that you can throw out and fill up again for the next go with some new water and paint.

Don’t forget a wiper to remove the thousands of bubbles that form inside on the glass surfaces

Have fun and post some results back here :-)

Nice story and good job!
But:
- Why did you set everything up in the garden and not in the house?
- It can be solved much easier in a black tent with two holes. One for the camera lens to enter and the other to be able to insert the dye. In this formula all unwanted reflections are eliminated. A long matte black lens hood helps even more.

I guess I didn't want a possible big mess with lots of water and paint in the house ;-)
...so it seemed like a good idea, on that warm afternoon, to use the garden with easy access to water and a drain to empty out the tank each time.
In my case, the problem wasn't stray light getting into the lens from the side; where a long lens hood would help, but more from the reflections coming straight from the glass tank itself.
If you can set it up indoors, with a black tent, then it would definitely be much easier to control the lighting and you'd have no reflections :-)
I'd reccomend having an assistant to pour in the "paint" so that you can operate the camera.

Good luck

That's a nice effect!

These are types of photography I don't do much of. Perhaps this nice thread will encourage me to try more of such. Thank you for offering it!

I take a lot of photos of birds at a local dam. Sometimes when I pack my stuff and drive there, the birds are somewhere else, and that's when I'm likely to look for other things. Some may turn out more like abstracts than anything else. The dam is an old industrial and has lots of odd angles and textures, and of course water does something different every minute. This is a dam-bow, visible in certain conditions at a certain time of day from certain angles.

The image is very interesting, it has a confusing content, despite the explanations provided.
The background seems to be a painted wall, positioned a short distance behind the steps. The two steps on the right seem to project a shadow on the background.😀

Super images in this thread so far.
Thanks to everyone for participating,
barondla

Looks excellent. You used just enough movement to avoid total blur. The monotones suit the composition.
Thanks for sharing,
barondla

Spectacular results. The colors are amazing.
Thanks for sharing,
barondla

Cool effect. I've never seen or heard of anything quite like this before. It needs a name.
Thanks for sharing and helping shepherd this thread,
barondla

Composition is perfect. Image has a surreal vibe. We'll seen.
Thanks for sharing,
barondla

The shadows bring out the grizzly nature of the tree quite well. B&W suits the subject perfectly.
Thanks for sharing,
barondla