during snowfall…
[Layered exposures, made with camera movement]
Karen McRae, 2015
camera movement
River & Road (old and new)
The river in full snow and low light, last January (long exposure with camera movement).
Bare streets and coloured lights, today at dusk (long exposure with camera movement).
Karen McRae, 2015
Navy Blue Night (with snowfall)
We have lost the snow ~ the light of winter ~ so I went back to look at some photographs from last year and found these; images made at night while a gentle snow was falling. These are in-camera double exposures, the first exposure is a still frame with flash (to catch the snowflakes), and in the second exposure camera movement was used to ‘sketch’ in the landscape. I have shifted the colour somewhat to make them look as inky as the night felt.
Karen McRae, 2014
Sketching Snowfall at Twilight
The twilight comes so early. The origami days will keep folding up tighter for another month. A month before the light begins to stretch back out. And with a bit of snow on the landscape it doesn’t seem so long, really.
[These photographs were made at dusk by ‘sketching’ the landscape using long exposures and camera movement.]
© Karen McRae, 2014
Common Wealth
Some ‘shifted landscapes’ in black and white. Not what I was planning on posting but there you go…I got distracted.
Cooling the Landscape
[These are in-camera double exposures with one exposure made using camera movement]
© Karen McRae, 2014
Wild Grasses
A photograph made by blending three different ‘drive-by’ images (and a smattering of selective erasing on 2 of the layers). It seems I am obsessively endlessly fascinated by the exploration of ‘movement’ when making photographs. : )
From the photographic series ‘Colour Field’
© Karen McRae, 2014
Night Light
Sometimes when I feel like my work or ideas are getting monotonous I try to think of my camera as a sort of sketchbook and think of ways I might capture ‘sketches’ of the landscape rather than more ‘representative’ photographs. I’ll try using double exposures, long exposures and/or maybe camera movement to get a different sort of feel happening.
These are a few images from a snowy winter evening when I went out to just play. No expectations or specific ideas – in my mind I was simply sketching the night and following my intuition as I experimented. I made setting adjustments as the camera gave me feedback. At times I used flash to capture the snowflakes and elements in the foreground along with exposures lasting several seconds, and at times also moving the camera to see what might happen.
In the first image you can see that I was moving my camera up and down which created light trails from a light source on the other side of the woods. A strange image but there is something about it that I find oddly appealing. Perhaps it reinforces the idea that a camera is a tool with endless possibilities and every so often I need to be reminded of this.
I wasn’t initially planning on posting these as they seemed to be more about process than result – technically they are quite noisy – but I sort of like the soft-focused, grainy look of them and in the end they really are sketches of a snowy winter night.
© Karen McRae, 2014
draw and shoot 