There’s no doubt about it: The digital age and post-processing software have liberated photographers from the tyranny of film. No longer do we have to wait for days or even weeks to see the results of a photo shoot. And we will never again find ourselves at the mercy of indifferent—or incompetent—labs. With digital SLRs and superb lenses now readily available at every big-box retailer, photographers can enlarge the smallest insect to the point where each vein and cephalic suture stands out in sharp detail. We can bring a soaring eagle close enough to see the upturned tips of his primaries, or slow the frantic wing beats of a feeding hummingbird, or photograph the craters of the moon. We can even freeze a waterfall in mid-plunge.

It often seems as if perfection is now within the grasp of everyman (and everywoman, too, of course). But hold on! While perfectly composed, preternaturally clear photographs are a joy to shoot and a marvel to behold, you can have too much of a good thing. When perfection becomes routine and predictable, it threatens to become…well…boring. That’s why I’ve been making a point to squint hard every now and then before looking at the world around me. I’ve found this to be a salutary exercise in the virtues of imperfect vision, and it all began with a mistake:

I’d intended to shoot the trees silhouetted against a sunlit meadow, but a mosquito drilled down into my forefinger just as I pressed the shutter, and I flinched, jarring the camera. The blurry photo above is the result. I nearly deleted it then and there, but on looking at the image displayed in my camera’s preview screen, I found it curiously compelling. It looked less like a stock scenic and more like an impressionist watercolor.

This initial mistake encouraged me to begin experimenting with abstract photos, hoping to bring out nature’s beauty by indirection rather than photo-realism—by emphasizing form, color, and movement, rather than fine detail. Here, for example, is the start of a trail leading into the woods:

Next up is a stand of maples, newly leafed-out and photographed against a cloudless spring sky. I broke yet another rule in the photographer’s handbook in making this, zooming in on the scene throughout an unecessarily long exposure.

I now had two tools in my indirection bag of tricks: Moving the camera while snapping the shutter and zooming in (or out) during an exposure. Next up? Deliberately shooting out-of-focus shots (aka OOF). The result bears a striking resemblance to a pointillist painting, as the following examples show, beginning with this shot of a sunrise seen through a hedgerow:

And continuing with another sunrise shot, this one taken through the new leaves of a flowering crab, with the light filtered still further by a nearby lilac:

Flowing water also makes a fine subject for out-of-focus shots. In this one, I pointed my lens upstream toward a low ledge:

Here, sparkling wavelets lap against a rocky foreshore:

While elsewhere a glassy tongue of water reveals its many colors:

And two converging flows collide:

Only to tumble over a waterfall:

Before surging headlong through a bony drop:

Where the root-beer Adirondack water contrasts strikingly with the rapid’s white horses:

Of course, it’s perfectly possible to discover abstract forms in sharply focused and properly exposed shots, as this photo of ripples in a quiet pool demonstrates:

Or this glimpse of the tousled surface of shallow forest rill:

The bottom line? When you tire of the easy perfection of modern digital photography, why not take a walk on the wild side? Test the artistic merits of indirection. Eschew fine detail and obsessive fidelity for the gloriously anarchic world of form, color, and movement. Is the pursuit of the perfectly exposed image good? Of course. But—just now and then—see if you, too, don’t agree that you can have too much of a good thing.

 
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