Abstract Attack! - Nature

This is the first of a series of News articles I plan on posting, writing about Abstract photography and what I noticed while going through thousands upon thousands of images on DeviantArt.

First up: Nature!


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A search for "nature" in the Newest section of Photography->Abstract & Surreal->Abstract yields a little over 3500 results.

Some of the things I noticed...

1) Too. Many. Photoshop. Filters. I'm sure this would be noticed in any search of DA's extensive Photography section, but c'mon. I must have seen hundreds of images that the respective artists should have categorized under Photomanipulation. Three of the worst offenders: Glowing Edges, Polar Coordinates, and Twirl.
Taking a bad picture and messing it up some more does not make it abstract, it just makes it a bad, messed up photomanipulation.

2) Lots of close-ups of wood. And I mean tons. Some were good, most were not. Luckily, no wood in a "human anatomy" sense was to be found.

3) Keyword abuse. As in, "Here's a picture of some man-made metal, with no nature in it at all, but I'll put nature in the keywords because it's Act Like An Idiot Day."
If you attach keywords to your pictures that have nothing to do with the picture, then every day is Act Like An Idiot Day for you.

4) Fairly equal amounts of color and black & white. This was quite surprising, as I was expecting an overwhelming majority of color photography. Although most of my favorites were color, there were still a decent number of good black & whites.

5) Quite the collection of under-appreciated work (as well as a few appreciated ones). My favorites are below. They all have at least a semi-focus on nature, or at least lot of nature in them.


       
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I was happy to see a strong lack of Macro shots here, since there is a dedicated Macro section within DA.

What I appreciated the most, however, was seeing how much experimentation into abstractness is going on here. From crazy angles of trees to odd close-ups (not macros, just closer-composed or closer-cropped pictures) of branches to not-quite-landscapes to the clashing of man versus nature: there is a big variety to be had in the Abstract area of DA's Photography section. I would highly suggest checking it out...

Until next time!