Trying out techniques suggested by YouTube photographer Max Kent for dreamy photos. I’ve used all these techniques before but I felt inspired to do something different this day as my previous photoshoot was very “straight”.

TL;DR Dreamy photos have movement, compressed layers, and/or depth (usually derived via selective focus). That is, not everything in the scene is rendered perfectly sharp and legible—some things are left to the viewer’s imagination. Dreamy photos often reflect the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi—the acceptance of imperfection and transience.

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The setting sun in a clear sky was illuminating the trees. Went into the stand of birches and oaks across the road and took a few photos. Then headed down the road to our little beach to photograph near the water.

I used some of Max Kent’s tips for “dreamy photos.” The longest lens I currently have on hand is not very long—24mm—but it has a relatively fast ƒ/1.8 aperture.

To get a tighter image crop and thus a more compressed field-of-view, I shot with a square 1:1 aspect ratio. Of course I shot RAW, so I had the option of shifting the crop slightly in post (which I did for a few photos), but the final images are all square if they were square in-camera.

Shooting with the foreground out of focus is fairly easy—just get close and use a moderate to fast aperture (ƒ/2.8 to ƒ5.6). Getting distant backgrounds out of focus when shooting with a wide-angle lens is a little more difficult if the in-focus subject is more than a few metres away. In those case, I needed to shoot with a fast aperture almost wide-open, and perhaps focus slightly closer than the actual subject (the closer the focus plane is, the narrower the depth of focus, regardless of the aperture used).

I didn’t use all the techniques in every photograph. The photos shot looking up at the sunlit oaks are very straightforward. But the lines and the shapes and perhaps the shooting angle give the images an ethereal quality.

Photos taken 2024-06-26, Majdy, Poland