With this rainy day abstraction, I focused carefully on a window wet with the incoming rain, and not on the colorful town beyond. I used a moderate telephoto setting (112mm) and a fairly wide aperture (f/5.6) to further visually separate the window from the scenery behind. I was standing close to the window, and focusing almost as close as the lens could go (about 30cm).

The point was to create a painterly abstract, which comes through when the image is seen in a large size. However, to get a sense of the actual, literal vista and the colorful houses and vegetation in the out-of-focus areas it is best to view the image on a postage stamp scale from a distance, and to squint!

if you are interested in using your camera to create abstract or semi-abstract images, there are many interesting techniques that should be in your toolkit. This example demonstrates the power of selective focus. Besides throwing an image out of focus (entirely, or selectively, or focusing on the “wrong” thing) some of the other most useful camera abstraction techniques are intentional camera motion, long exposure capture of moving subjects, and in-camera multiple exposing.

This image was photographed from a hallway in my hotel in Cat Ba, Vietnam, during a brief but heavy tropical downpour.