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‘Unfluid’ is an experimental series about how perception changes physical states. The physical state of water. Turned from liquid to solid. By freezing the motion. The perception: Expanded by the use of modern camera technology.

I got the idea for a project like this back at the beginning of 2020 while shooting a waterfall in the Black Forest, Southern Germany. As I tried to freeze the motion of the falling water by using extremely fast shutter speeds at around 1/2000 to 1/8000 I realized how beautiful & unique the shapes of the water were appearing. It instantly reminded me of some sort of ice structures or frozen water droplets at the side of a lake during freezing cold temperatures.

With this knowledge about the potential of this technique I started visiting different waterfalls on the Swabian Jura, the Black Forest & Southern Bavaria with the goal of creating close up shots of flowing & falling water that looks like patterns of ice.

A lot of those waterfalls were located in rather gloomy places like gorges & ravines, which made working with extremely high shutter speeds really difficult without neglecting the ISO & the aperture. The result was that I had to work with a really shallow depth of field & a high ISO to make the photo happen in most of the places without underexposing them too much & loosing details of the images. The biggest challenge was shooting the closeups of the water with a macro lens as the depth of field was even more shallow which made balancing aperture, ISO & shutter speed even harder.

Some photos were taken with a macro lens & some were taken with high focal lengths at around >200mm – just a few below 200mm. In general, I wanted to get really close to the water as I wanted to showcase the results of the ‘freezing-process’ up close with its painterly & abstract character.

Liquid to solid. Fluid to unfluid. Water to ice.

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Germany / 2020 – 2021