by Steve Bourne
In March 2020, on the day that the first lockdowns were announced, I was shooting some photos in my local park. While I was wandering around I remembered reading an article in a camera magazine on woodland photography. One particular paragraph said, basically, “to get a more abstract image, set a shutter speed of 1/10th second and move the camera vertically during the exposure.” Having not heard of ICM before, deliberately moving the camera like this sounded a bit counter intuitive, but I gave it a go and came up with this image –
As the lockdown went on and as travel was so restricted I quickly ran out of places to go and things to photograph. And, I could understand the technical parts of using a camera, but it was the creative side that I wanted to develop.
So I did a bit of research and it turns out that there are people out there already doing ICM. And the good news was that I didn’t need any expensive gear to do it! All I needed was my camera, and maybe a polarizing filter and a 6-stop ND filter for those longer exposures. That was it, away I went, merrily wobbling and waving my camera all over the place!
I discovered that even within the genre of ICM there are all sorts of different styles. There’s the simple, single image that requires little processing like the woodland one above, or this one –
Then there’s those that involve multiple images and a bit of processing work like this –
Or you could try this “ in the round” style, moving around a subject taking several images and combining them in post-processing –
There is so much to ICM when you start to delve into it, so why not give it a go? You might find yourself pleasantly surprised at what you come up with!
