my florida camera

I have discovered a little corner of photographic heaven on my Olympus E-M5. It's called the key-line art filter. I came across it quite by accident, flipping through the art filters one after another, trying each one out. When I finally selected this one it was, for me, utterly fun. Freeing. I've been using it through the afternoon and evening.

For me the filter is a bit like expressionism in a can (see "The Scream" by Edvard Munch, for example) combined with the works of Leroy Neiman and the rotoscope effect of the movie "A Scanner Darkly." I find the art filter's effect marvelous. All of these were taken from late afternoon until early evening and come straight out of the camera. I used Olympus Viewer 2 to resize the JPEGs.

Some of the techniques I used for a number of these exposures was to deliberately defocus the 17mm lens on the E-M5. Out-of-focus areas wound up looking rather creamy and pure of color. The posterization effect still gives the lock of focus, of sharp lines demarcating areas, as if the lens were still in some sort of focus. Under extreme defocusing the image was very abstract, such as the last image at the bottom of the post.

The E-M5 is now my Florida camera, capable of taking the bright colors of a Florida day, or the crazy colors of kitschy I-Drive, and give me what I've been searching for for some time now. I like everything about this filter except the black boards. I've gone back into the E-M5 and turned that part of the art filter off. I'm sure you're going to be bored silly by my photos during this period long before I'll be.