ABSTRACT THURSDAY - ICM

For the uninitiated, ICM can mean either the International Confederation of Midwives or the Institute of Commercial Management but in the case of photographers, it means Intentional Camera Movement, something which I find very easy when I am not trying to do it and very difficult when I am!!

The brief for today’s AT challenge is Intentional Camera Movement and I could have read up on it via Google, but decided just to go out and do it.  

It takes a lot of courage to swing your camera from side to side - not the iPhone because that doesn’t swing too well - but it takes a LOT MORE courage to grab your camera by its strap and swing it round your head!  No doubt if the neighbours had seen me, they would have definitely thought known I had “gone loopy”!

I was surprised that a lot of my first shots - and I took almost 100 in all - were in good focus and didn’t look a bit like abstracts, so they have been consigned to the trash bin on my Macbook.

I then decided that to get a good ICM shot I would need to put the camera on to timer - but 2 seconds wasn’t long enough, so I put it on to 10 seconds and instructed it to take 3 shots each time and this was the best of the bunch, which at least looks like an abstract, or even a baby scan, with apologies to any pregnant women reading this - so it is ICM and SOOC. 

Along with many others, I’m sure that about 75% of my photographs, if not more, when we used film, in the old days, were spoilt by ICM and often came back from the developers with red stickers on them to say they were “out of focus”.  Now it’s quite difficult to get the modern cameras to take a shot like this - how things have moved on and even calling it Intentional Camera Movement makes it acceptable!  I was obviously well “before my time” all those years ago!

“Your first 10.000 photographs are the worst.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson