Terrestrial Brush Stroke

This image is one of my favorites that I have made with a new technique I have been trying and I have been anxious to share the story behind it with you! Taken one day before the base image of "Forest Fulmination", another favorite of mine, it was one of the first images that I successfully took out of a car window and was able to blur the foreground while maintaining decent focus in the background.

Why am I shooting out of a car window? Well, that's an interesting story and you can read all about it in my post about the story behind "Forest Fulmination". It was quite an eventful weekend when I shot these and we spent a lot of time stuck in the car because we couldn't return to our home (but our trip to Hawn State Park was well worth all the time we had to spend bathing our dogs and then staying away from home!).

I will admit, there are other images in which the background is perfectly frozen and focused but this one particularly got my attention because of how smooth the foreground is. Of course, this trait is also what earns this image the name "Terrestrial Brush Stroke". To accomplish this image, I was unable to rest on the side of the door because of the movement it caused but I was also working with a slower shutter speed to allow for some motion blur. When you're in a moving vehicle, it is quite the challenge to see a scene worth photographing, compose a shot, focus, and take the shot. Needless to say, while I have a few images that you'll see from these days of shooting out of cars, there are countless images that absolutely did not turn out!

One of my favorite things about art is that it can sometimes be perfectly imperfect. Initially, when I saw this image, I was displeased by the few imperfections that caught my eye but I couldn't bring myself to fully trash it. When I finally decided to give it a quick edit, I was enamored by the way the grass was so impeccably blurred and it created with me a sense of surreal wonder, turning this potentially uneventful landscape into a dream-like capture of what feels like a painting by Mother Nature herself.

It is in these moments of experimentation that I learn most about myself and my preferences when it comes to my art. I am working on being less critical of technical perfection when it comes to my images and aiming more for inspiring feelings and emotions within the viewers of my work. It is my goal to allow people to feel what I feel when I experience a scene in person and not just to simply see what I see.