As the song goes, “Girls just wanna have fun.” Well, sometimes photographers just want to have fun too. With all the years of intense study and learning and nose-to-the-grindstone hard work that goes into becoming a good photographer, and making beautiful photographic images, there are times when you just want to play around and be silly. A solid knowledge of camera settings and a few special skills in post-processing can give you the tools to do some crazy things with pictures.
The photo above shows a picture of a group of red flowers in a tree shot with intentional camera movement. This technique is one of the simplest to shoot. You can try different movements too: spin, shake side to side, move up or down at an angle. It’s all about playing around with different movements and different subjects. You are limited only by your imagination.
This image was captured in my backyard. I put a bowl of fruit on a table and aimed a lawn sprinkler in the direction of the bowl. I experimented with different locations and angles of the sprinkler. The sun was out, thus the shiny fruit. But it looks like a small rain cloud happened by.
One evening a friend and I walked around downtown looking for some photo opportunities. This shot was taken as a streetcar passed by. My camera was set to Manual Mode and the shutter speed was slow, about 1/30th of a second. This resulted in a transparent streetcar.
Another fun but also very artsy type of photograph that is seen quite often is creating images with light streaks. Here, too, we employ the use of a slow shutter speed with camera mounted on a tripod, while photographing moving vehicles at night, thus creating light streaks from headlights and taillights. Not an award-winning photo, but it’s fun to shoot and, hey, it gets you out of the house.
Blended in Photoshop
With camera mounted on a tripod to ensure zero camera movement, I shot three photos with my wife sitting in each of three deck chairs. Then, by using a very simple photo editing technique, I blended all 3 images together making this weirdly fun photo.
Speaking of weird, here I took a single photo with a tripod mounted camera of my daughter lying on a bench in a nearby park. I also took a photo of the bench only. In Photoshop, I was able to extract my daughter from the background, oftentimes a very easy task, and then pasted her several different places, sizes and orientations on the bench-only photo. The result is pure silliness.
These are by no means all of the ways you can use your gear to create odd images, stretch your talents and have fun with photography. Double exposures, stop action with subjects jumping, creating optical illusions, forced perspective, face swaps. There’s no limit to how you can use your camera to find new ways to be creative and goofy.