This simple and colorful hanging flower box provided a welcome opportunity to create an energy-filled composition. Standing over a portion of the flower box, I envisaged a composition reminiscent of my youth when I would squirt paints on a paper and spin it for several seconds to reveal a kaleidoscope of colors. So how did I do this with a camera?

First I pulled out my 16–35mm wide-angle lens and a 2- to 8-stop ND filter. With my lens set to the focal length of 20mm and fitted with my filter, I set a correct exposure of f/11 for 1/4 sec. As I pressed the shutter release, I rotated the camera in a right-to-left circular motion, as if drawing a circle. At the same time, with my other hand, I zoomed the lens from 20mm to 35mm. All of this took place in 1/4 sec., so I needed to be quite fast.

A simple flower box may look nondescript.

The energy-filled result.
16–35mm lens, f/11 for 1/4 sec. with Vivitar 2- to 8-stop ND filter

This technique is not limited to flowers. During a bike-a-thon in Vancouver, British Columbia, I stood close to the curb with my 16–35mm lens. As the cyclists came by, I spun the camera while zooming at the same time, shooting at 1/4 sec. in Shutter Priority mode with the aid of my 3-stop ND filter. Normally f/22 is an aperture associated with deep depth of field, but depth of field is never a concern in shots like this since any sharpness will get blurred out because of the spinning and moving of the camera.

16–35mm lens, f/22 for 1/4 sec. with 3-stop ND filter

One spring, while on the Greek Island of Santorini, I spent the better part of a full afternoon photographing the lupines and daisies that seemed to grow all the way down the hillside to the deep blue Aegean Sea. I was fully immersed in a Monet mentality and shooting with carefree abandon. I tried a host of slow shutter speeds coupled with varying motions—up and down, side to side, herky-jerky. I am absolutely certain that anyone who saw me from a distance would have assumed that I was in a constant fight with the local honeybees, as my arms were in a constant flailing motion.

Note in this photograph the somewhat arch-like effect, as if the flowers were jumping or flying. I achieved this effect by simply arching the camera, quickly, during my 1/4-sec. exposure.

A hillside of lupines and daisies.

My Monet-inspired interpretation.
35–70mm lens, f/22 for 1/4 sec. with 4-stop ND filter

For me, the fall of 2006 in the southwest corner of Maine proved to be one of the most colorful I have ever witnessed. I had just finished a short morning hike in the mountains, feeling quite accomplished with what I had already photographed, when I spotted this simple stand of trees.

I made the first normal exposure with my camera and 70–300mm lens set to f/16 for 1/125 sec., at ISO 100. I made the second exposure with the same camera and lens, but added a 2- to 8-stop ND filter to my lens, which caused a light loss of 6 stops. To recover these 6 stops, I simply readjusted my shutter speed from 1/125 sec. down to 1/2 sec. so that my meter once again indicated a correct exposure. I also stopped the aperture down by 1 full stop, to f/22, which meant I needed to double my exposure again from 1/2 sec. to 1 second to return to a correct exposure. This extra stop would of course give me a shutter speed twice as long, and in this case I felt the longer the better! (Practice and your own personal taste will help you decide when to use an extra stop or two.) Then I pressed the shutter release and slowly moved the camera upward in a smooth, flowing motion. The result was the streaks of color and texture that you see in the second image.

In the third exposure, I achieved a different effect by combining this “Monet” technique with a multiple exposure and a faster speed. By going into the camera’s menu and selecting “multiple exposure, nine times,” I told the camera to shoot nine exposures, all overlapping one another on a single frame. (This multiple-exposure feature can be found on many current Nikon, Pentax, and Canon DSLRs.) I removed the ND filter and returned to my initial exposure of f/16 for 1/125 sec. While holding down the camera’s shutter release during the nine exposures, I moved the camera ever so slightly, a tiny bit to the left, a touch to the right, slightly up and down. This produced a kind of pallette-knife, painterly effect.

For this technique to work, it is essential to set a correct exposure as if you are shooting just one shot, even though you are shooting multiple exposures. Your camera’s autogain feature will blend the exposures into a single image and render that final image as correctly exposed. It doesn’t get any easier than that!

A colorful stand of trees.
70–300mm lens, f/16 for 1/125 sec.

Streaks of color created by moving the camera up and down.
70–300mm lens, f/22 for 1 second with 2- to 8-stop ND filter

A multiple exposure creates a third type of effect.
70–300mm lens, f/16 for 1/125 sec., shot nine times and auto-blended into one exposure