There are often just nuances that make the difference between a boring and a perfect photo. From my love for retro lenses, I know that it is often imperfection that makes a photo really special. Lens flares, blurring or distortion in the optics – it is precisely these changes that subconsciously stand out from the everyday mush of photos. And it is precisely this charm of the mixture that often invites you to linger over a photo instead of practicing „scrolling on“, which is firmly anchored in our lives. But to create this image look is not always easy. Nikk Wong, a photographer from Washington, was able to remedy this with his Kickstarter project GET FRACTALS. Because he created a set with three optical filters which, when held in front of the camera, cause massive amounts of distortion, flares and reflections. Sounds strange at first and looks something like this in practice: https://twitter.com/Los_Sperlos/status/1261249968133869568 But of course it is not so important which contortions I make behind the camera as a photographer, but what the result looks like in the end. I tested this during a shoot with Sigrun and Kristina to show a few of the possible effects. Of course, that was only a fraction of the possible, because especially under artificial light (e.g. at concerts) there are tons of other possibilities. But already in the photos, which were taken under pure natural light, you can see how much an image is changed by the filters.
Just the possibility of directing the eye to a certain image section opens up completely new possibilities in the choice of location, as you can, for example, simply make uninteresting image content disappear. So here I have simply covered a slightly boring bush with the reflections in the picture and thus put the focus on model Sigrun. It is also possible to simply project other sections of the environment into the image via reflections, such as the cloudy sky, which I have integrated in the following image by holding the Get Fractal Filter diagonally into the image.
German