Shooting thru Textured Glass

Atechnique I’ve enjoyed since the early 70’s is shooting through textured glass. There are many ways, now, to abstract photographs and to add all kinds of effects for artistic purposes, but I’ve never seen any of them simulate what you can create by using textured glass.

All that’s needed is a small piece of glass. If you want to do portraits, then a 16x20 piece works well. For flowers, you only need an 8x10 inch piece. Many times, glass companies have remnants of various types of textured glass which can be cut to your specifications for just a few dollars. When you purchase glass, the first thing you need to do is tape the edges and corners with thick duct tape to protect yourself from cuts. Glass is incredibly sharp and unforgiving if you handle it carelessly.

To set up the shots, make sure the glass is held perpendicular to the floor or ground. For a makeshift stand, I made a narrow cut in a small piece of 2x4 wood, and the glass sits in there perfectly.

You can control how much definition your subjects will have by the distance between them and the glass. The closer the glass is to the subjects, the more definition there will be. For example, the glass was about four inches away from the flowers shown below.

I prefer to use extensive depth of field so both the texture in the glass and the subjects are sharp. Note that even though you are shooting abstracted subjects, sharpness is still important. There is a big difference between a blurred abstract and a sharp abstract. I typically like to use f/16 to f/32.

I always use a tripod for this technique because that frees my hands in case I need to hold something else. It also makes using a small aperture with a low ISO feasible.

It’s important to make the back of the camera, i.e. the plane of the digital sensor, as par- allel as possible to the plane of the glass. This helps increase depth of field. You’ll be shooting fairly closely to the surface of the glass, and this decreases depth of field. The combination of a small aperture and making the sensor parallel is enough to recover that loss.

I recommend both the subject itself and the piece of glass be photographed in diffused light. If you are going for the look of a painting, this will help a lot. If you selected the ideal textured glass, the results will look very much like a painting, a real work of art. §

There are many types of textured glass. Choose one (or two) in which the texture is more subtle as opposed to pronounced and bold. You want the focus to be on the subject, not the texture.