Drawing Bokeh by Hand

How intentional camera movement turned pink plum blossoms into a reflex lens

I walk around my suburb every couple of days. On one of those walks the plum trees along the street were suddenly in pink flowers. Spring had reached Canberra at last, which after months of chilly weather is a wonderful thing to be told. I went home thinking how I might photograph them. The next day I came back with a camera, no plan beyond trying intentional camera movement.

Looking at the frames on the camera back, my first feeling was pure delight. I must somehow have been shooting with a different lens. Hundreds of small bright rings, a good number closed into complete donuts, suspended in a field of pink and blue. Anyone who has used an old reflex telephoto will recognise them at once.

There was no mirror lens, and no trickery of any kind. Every one of those circles was drawn by hand, in the last half hour before sunset, by moving the camera while the shutter was open.

A practising art

I keep returning to ICM for one reason above all. I cannot reproduce these frames, and neither can anybody else. A landscape can be repeated. Give someone the location, the hour, comparable weather, and they will come away with much the same picture. I could stand under that tree tomorrow at the same minute in the same light and still not get these images, because my hands will not travel the same path twice. Even within one afternoon I can hardly make two frames alike. That is where the uniqueness lives, and why it needs practising, not for a repeatable result but because the stroke is all you get. It is closer to calligraphy than to photography.

Once I was there, I began with vertical movement, following the line of the branches and trunks. It is the obvious thing to do. The results were, frankly, dull. Then it occurred to me to turn the camera instead of sliding it. The first circular frame changed the afternoon.

Blossom turns out to be ideal raw material. A flowering tree gives thousands of small, bright, well separated points of light against dark branches and open sky, each a pen nib waiting to draw. A canopy in full leaf would not do it, because broad leaves cover the gaps and little sky comes through. Plum flowers on bare wood before the leaves arrive, exactly the window you want, and in these frames the blossom really does bloom.

The kit, and the shape of the frame

I used a Fujifilm GFX 50S with the Laowa 17mm f/4 Zero-D, a fully manual lens taking in 113 degrees, which given the sensor’s 0.79 crop factor is roughly a 13mm angle of view in full frame terms. It also focuses down to 18 centimetres, which matters as much as the width. Between them I could push right in among the branches, close enough that blossom and twigs fill the frame corner to corner.

The camera offers a range of aspect ratios and I chose 65:24, the old Hasselblad XPan shape. Standing that close, branches and blossom cross the whole letterbox with open sky behind. The marks read as texture edge to edge. Aperture was f/32, the minimum on this lens, at a fixed ISO 100. That does two jobs. It drags the shutter into the range where movement registers, and it keeps each highlight tight. A tight point draws a clean thread; a spread one smudges.

What the marks actually are

I have called this drawing bokeh by hand, and I should be careful, because two things are going on. Some of it is genuinely bokeh. The lens scale puts hyperfocal at about a metre and I was often focused nearer than that, so distant branches do fall away soft. That suits me, since I want an impression, not a record. There is diffraction softness at f/32 as well. Chasing critical sharpness, that would trouble me. In ICM, who cares?

But the rings are not that. Move the camera in a small circular stirring motion during the exposure and every point of light traces a copy of that motion. The path your hands travel is the shape that lands on the sensor, once for each bright point.

Look at the arcs in any one frame and they all open the same way. They are congruent, because they record one gesture. A mirror lens gives rings too, but the same ring every time, at whatever size the optics decide. By hand I choose how large, where it sits, whether it stays a shallow arc or closes into a full donut. And any lens will do it. The shape is mine, not the optic’s.

Length of exposure equals length of arc

The fraction of a circle you draw is how much of a turn your hands completed while the shutter was open. A short exposure catches a small segment and gives a crescent. A longer one catches more. Complete a full revolution before the shutter shuts and the circle joins into a ring.

Aperture priority means the camera decides how much time I get, and I do not find out until afterwards, so the work is adapting to a number I cannot see. When the light is bright and the shutter short I must stir faster to get round; as it falls I can slow down without losing the circle.

I changed nothing to bring this about. The light dimmed, aperture priority let the shutter lengthen from 1/10 to 0.3 second, and the circles completed themselves.

You can take that uncertainty away. Set the shutter yourself at about 0.3 second, hold the aperture at its minimum and put the ISO on auto. You will know exactly how long you have and move with more confidence. But I prefer not knowing. Guessing at the light, sensing how fast to turn my hands for it, getting it wrong and adjusting, keeps me attentive to the evening in a way that one fixed rotation at one fixed exposure never would. That attention is what the craft means to me.

Which way the opening faces

Orientation is the other variable. I prefer arcs that open at the bottom, because the shape echoes the droop of a laden branch and reads as a lit form with shadow beneath. Which segment you catch is set by the instant you press, and what lands on the sensor is inverted relative to your hands, so there is no reasoning it out in advance. You shoot, you look, you learn the timing.

Try it yourself

Blossom season is short, so here is the method.

1. Find backlit blossom. Peach, cherry, plum, any of them, in the hour after sunrise or before sunset with the sun low so the flowers are rimmed with light. This is really light painting, and low backlighting gives you the light to paint with.
2. Get underneath and look up, with the widest lens you own, as close as it will focus. You want branches radiating from the centre and sky filling the gaps. Set a panoramic crop if your camera has one, or crop to shape afterwards.
3. Use the smallest aperture your lens has. Minimum apertures vary more than people expect. Many wide zooms stop at f/22, this Laowa at f/32. Aperture priority at base ISO is the simplest start, with the shutter between about 1/15 and half a second.
4. Start moving before you press. Let the front of the lens describe a small circle in the air. The swing is tiny. Keep going until it becomes a rhythm, not a deliberate action.
5. Press without stopping the motion. Do not brace for the shot. The instant you stiffen, the curve breaks and you get a straight streak.
6. Shoot runs of five or more at first, varying only the moment of the press, and read them on the rear screen of your camera. That is a beginner’s method and you will not need it long. Once you can feel which instant gives the arc or donut you want, you will simply know when to press.

Three things go wrong predictably. Straight streaks mean a pan or a tilt rather than a circle, so make the movement smaller and rounder. Arcs that stay short and circles that never join mean the same thing, that you are not sweeping enough of the turn, so stir faster or wait for dimmer light. Mush means too many overlapping highlights, so find a sparser tree.

The gesture is the signature

ICM is not really about the camera. What it records is a movement made by one pair of hands, at one speed, released at one instant. The gesture is not even fixed. With my eye at the eyepiece I swing the camera in a cone; working off the rear screen, it flattens into a circle. Same idea, different hand, different marks.

That is why it needs practising, and why I will be back under the same tree while the blossom holds. The circles are not something the lens gave me. They are something I drew, and I am still learning the handwriting.