Featured Artist Kelly O’Neal

Artsy Shark presents the work of Kelly O’Neal. Visit her website and blog to see more of her portfolio, become a fan of her Facebook page, and stop by her Etsy shop.

 

 

E. Kelly O’Neal is a fine-art nature photographer, currently specializing in abstract images of nature created by moving the camera during exposure.  Kelly grew up in Florida and has since lived in North Carolina, Hawaii, Texas, Boston, and now Burlington, Vermont where she constantly delights in the sunsets over Lake Champlain.

 

 

My love of photography started closely married to my love of travel.  Much of my work has focused on capturing new and inspiring places of the world—the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Ireland, China, Palau, Thailand, and most recently, Iceland!  I hope to inspire other people to see the world and take better care of it.

But my photography groove right now is creating impressionistic, abstract photos of nature through camera motion.  It’s a bit unpredictable and experimental.  I like it.

 

 

It started as a way to blow off steam.  In 2007 I was in the midst of a stressful 14-hour-a-day job, and I found solace and comfort in photography.  Though I was a nature photographer, the sun was up when I was at work—so I started to play with my camera at night, literally dancing around while making photographs of bouquets of flowers, splashing swaths of unidentifiable color across my virtual page.  With practice I learned how to move both me and the camera to get that painterly impressionist effect just right.

 

 

I wasn’t planning on doing this elsewhere, but I felt the tug to try this out during my annual fall leaf peeping photography jaunts.  With more practice, I could create the ethereal quality that captured, for me, the essence of place—that snapshot you keep in your head that doesn’t retain the details, but remembers the patterns and the colors and the light and the emotion they evoked.

Most recently I’ve been trying to expand the types of photos and shapes I make—using new camera movements and trying this out on new subjects.  Some new images of red and yellow trees from the fall of 2010 are some of my favorites, keeping the structure and intensity of the trees but obscuring much of the detail.  They were really fun to work on and turned out more vibrant than many of my other images, which tend to be more subdued.  I’ve also had fun using these techniques in an urban setting—on the Eiffel Tower, for example.

 

 

Being out in nature shooting is one of my favorite things about photography—I adore the peace and serenity of nature.  The silence.  The calm.  A welcome contrast to the frenzy and chaos of modern life.  I try to capture that tranquility in my art.  The details are blurred out, creating a simple quiet impression of the place.

Through motion, I create stillness.

I hope you enjoy getting to know my art!