Bends the eye a little, does it not? So what is this, me playing around with some liquefy filter in Photoshop after having been possessed by Vincent Van Gogh in one of his madder moments?

No fellow PBasers, this is a photograph, Actual, undistorted and unretouched beyond a levels filter to deepen the blacks a smidge.

It was hot, sticky, humid and glary today, your average late summer day in Sydney. It was a day I decided to experiment with my circular polariser to see what I could do about the glare that inevitably haunts (perhaps curses would be more apt) my lunch time photography.

I noticed a leaf floating in the water above the rocks just near the shoreline. With the CP filter in place I could also see down to the rocks themselves and the rock oysters attached thereto.

(The digital viewfinder does not show the effect of either a CP or an ND filter as reliably or honestly as an optical viewfinder, so you do need to experiment with "which way is up" before you put it on so that you can adjust the mark on the ring accordingly. But after a while you do start to be able to pick up the differences in appearance through the digital viewfinder.)

The water was lapping against the shoreline so I knew that unless I cranked the ISO up to "damn near infinity" and opened up to about f/0.00005 I was going to get some distortion from the light passing through the moving water, so rather than fight that I decide to embrace it. I will admit though that the abstraction that resulted was rather greater than I had anticipated. It's especially noticeable in comparison to the sharpness of the leaf.

Still, it made for a natural image that sits well outside my usual comfort zone.

Last Year