Category: Portola Valley

Here’s a second example of slow shutter cam photography using my iPhone 14 Pro Max (here’s my first example). This is a photo of another redwood circle at the Portola Valley Town Center. This one is immediately behind the main town hall building. By the way, both of these redwood circles have picnic tables in the center of the circles making them a beautiful spot to have a quiet outdoor lunch!

As with my first example, this was shot using the Slow Shutter Cam app – by doing a quick short pull down of the iPhone while the shutter was active for 0.5 seconds That provides the blur and also seems to shorten the height a bit. I then open the image in DistressedFX+ and try applying various textures and color backgrounds until I find something I find pleasing. Takes about 10 seconds!

I should have mentioned in my first post that I was first drawn to intentional camera photography by my friend Roxanne Overton. She has a very active Instagram feed with her ICM work – it’s always inspiring to see what she’s doing!

Yesterday I went for an afternoon walk at one of my favorite local places – Portola Valley Town Center.

The library there is among the best of our local libraries and the campus itself is a perfect place for a great walk. I enjoy walking the big loop around and can easily choose between options for either a half mile or full mile distance.

Yesterday there was a Sunday afternoon’s level of activity with a Little League baseball team out for practice and a very animated girls soccer game underway.

As I walked around the old school building I looked up and saw this circle of redwood trees with the sun behind them providing a beautiful glow. I’ve been experimenting with intentional camera movement (ICM) photography so I opened the Slow Shutter Cam app on my iPhone and made a quick vertical movement to slightly blur the trees. Later, at home, I used the Distressed FX+ app to add texture and color to the image resulting in the version shown here. I like the way it turned out!