The aim of this activity is to create some abstract images of the natural world using the camera on your phone and image manipulation software (either on your phone or a computer). You can shoot in black and white or colour, but the final images must be in black and white.

The images you create will be used to produce designs for brand new fire sculptures and fire rope drawings for our Boston Blossoms: Fire Garden event.

Hint – look for areas or objects where there is lots of contrast, shadows, silhouettes, a bright light source.

Hint – You can get nice ‘accidental’ effects like lens flare and bleached out areas by looking for the right kinds of lighting conditions. The best time to create a lens flare is sunrise and sunset on a sunny day, shooting directly into the sun (don’t look directly at it), and tilting your camera around until you get some nice streaks or orbs. But you can create a lens flare by pointing any light source towards the lens of your camera.

An example of a fire sculpture

• Once you have some images you like, use photo manipulation apps on your phone or digital software on your computer if you have it, to manipulate your images…
• Start by deciding if the image needs to be cropped, to get rid of uninteresting or irrelevant features.
• Make adjustments to settings such as black/white point, contrast, saturation, pop, highlights and shadows. Try each one out to see what happens. Adjust more than one setting.
• Add filters to the photo. Save it, and add another filter. Make more adjustments in the settings. Keep going!
• Adding more and more filters and playing with the settings over and over again will gradually abstract your image more and more. Who knows what you will end up with!

When you feel like you’ve done enough, desaturate your image to make it completely black and white (if you haven’t already done so). You can submit up to three of your best images by posting them to Instagram with #bostonblossoms, or email to ejc.creativeservices@gmail.com.

If you are happy for us to share your images on social media, please state this in your email.