As I continue to explore the possibilities of moving your camera while the shutter is open, I recently discovered the obvious – not all movements need to be in one direction (e.g. up-and-down, or side-to-side).  I managed to shoot an entire card, just experimenting with “movement shapes”.

Ok, so this is a lot harder than you may think.  As I was working on “curly-ques”, there is a fine line between interesting and muddled.  At one point I even recruited Peter to help me figure out how to execute the shape I wanted:  its a combination of speed of movement, and when you change direction – all within the split second time that the shutter is open.  In the examples below, I found it was better if I left the camera still when I first released the shutter to capture the original shape of the subject before I started to “paint in the movement”.  This discovery has opened up new realms (and hopefully more interesting abstracts).