In-Camera Impressionism
By Jim Hayes
25 March 2007
I recently attended a party in LA populated with cool people. It was an opening at a interior design firm where my son, who is a furnishings designer specializing in green materials like concrete, was showing some of his designs. The store owner was the son of a famous Hollywood star, so you can guess who attended!
Like always, I had my pocket camera (Panasonic FX-01) with me and took lots of photos. Taking pictures in very low light without flash can be lots of fun, because you get lots of motion blurring. Often digital cameras produce unappealing noisy images in low light. But when I started examining these photos in Photoshop, I found the low light/high noise photos had a unique look at high magnification, not pixilated, but more like an impressionist painting. I went through about 200 hundred photos at high magnification (100-200%) looking for interesting abstractions. The most interesting images were peoples, faces and hair particularly. The lost resolution and soft images, combined with the multicolored noise, made for some very appealing images. Using Photoshop's Bicubic sampling, I enlarged the images about 10X on the average, and the photos looked even better.
As someone who does not often take photos of people, prefering ot leave them alone, not violating their privacy, this was an interesting opportunity to take candid people shots unobtrusively. When you are so far away, it's easy to get good candids. And as someone who really likes to find photographic opportunities that look like abstract art, this was a really enjoyable discovery.
So here's what to try: If possible shoot the camera in a "night scene" type mode, using available light only. Underexpose by 1-2 EV since the in-camera meter will overexpose the highlights. Examine the photos at high magnification, looking for faces, features, etc. Examine the noise (like film grain) to see if your digital camera reacts like mine. If it does, crop out the parts of the image you like, then use "Image Size" to enlarge to useful sizes.
These are some of the images I shot that night, all cropped from much larger photos. You must click on the images to see the effect!
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