Kinetic Photography

Photography is like fashion, some styles and techniques rise in popularity whilst previously popular techniques fade into the past. I've seen happen time and again over the 20 years or so I've been an active photographer.

A great example of the ebb and flow in photography is black and white prints. In my early days "real" photographers had a darkroom and no one made colour prints. OK, there were a few people, me included, who did colour printing, but colour prints were the reserve of amateurs.

Of course the reality was that colour printing was far more complicated and expensive then black and white, so when easy digital inkjet prints came along everyone jumped to colour. A few years passed and suddenly colour prints were boring, ordinary and mundane. Suddenly black and white prints looked different, new and creative.

It's a funny old world.

So what has all that got to do with kinetic photography? Well, kinetic photography has never been, and probably never will hit the mainstream and that makes an interesting area to explore without fear that the results will look old and tired in a few years time.

So what is it? It's abstract art taken with your camera. It's more Tate Modern then The National Gallery and I'd love to make it into a large canvas print form my office wall.

But there's a twist. At the moment the image was taken the camera was moving through the air. Yes you read that right, the camera wasn't being held by me or a tripod, but falling to the ground.

No I can be mad, but I'm not stupid and the camera survived without a scratch. So here's how it's done.

The image is a photo of my TV which wasn't tuned to a channel. The camera (a Pentax Optio A20) was set to self timer and as the count down reached 1 second I tossed the camera a few inches in the air. It landed on a large beanbag safe and sound.

As a disclaimer, don't try this with a camera you really love. It could easily go wrong and result in a broken camera.

If you want to see more kinetic photography images there's a great group on Flickr. Here's the link.