If you’re looking for a new, creative way to shoot landscapes, this may be the video for you. Tom Woods' video might inspire you to capture your own motion-blur seascapes or use this technique for another creative landscape scene.
I really like abstract art and enjoy learning new ways to create interesting images, so when I came across this video, I was excited to go to the beach and experiment. This technique has been around for a while, but Woods gives you eight key tips to get the best images. I find the final images look so cool, and depending on what time you create them—from dusk to sunset to twilight—you get different dominant colors.
I followed Woods’ tips myself, and I ended up with really colorful, abstract art pieces. Woods emphasizes using a tripod to get straight lines and adjusting aperture speed depending on how blurry you want the lines and colors to look. I found that the speed at which you pan also plays a role in the look of the images.
These colorful images make great art pieces for your home or to sell to customers. They look like a painted canvas and take way less time to create.
"If you’re looking for a new, creative way to shoot"
This is hardly new. Hiroshi Sugimoto made a big splash with long exposures with his "Seascapes" book in 1995 and "Theaters" in 2006.
"New" and "creative" are almost always a function of imagination, rarely technique.
Yes, this technique has been around for a while. But shooting this way may be NEW to some people, including myself since I have never tried it before.
I've been a photographer for 25 years and only recently started to experiment with ICM and literally only a few weeks ago I went to the coast to capture a number of images. I have actually been following Shona Perkins @my_beautiful_scotland who produces stunning images from the beautiful Stunning coast using this effect but handheld following the contours of the water and landscape. So the effect may not be new but for 99% of photographers I am certain something they've never tried intentionally.