What do you do with Vaseline?
Chance is that none of your answers is related to photography. Even those of us that remember times B.C. (Before Computers) may not use it in this manor before. Before computers made photo manipulation so easy, fine art photographers used to smear Vaseline on a filter or a piece of glass, blurring it selectively.
I tried to revive some of that spirit by using the same technique today, with a small pocket camera that couldn’t optically blur the image in a controlled way like a bigger sensor camera with a bigger lens could. For this exercise I just use a piece of clear cellophane instead of glass, and put a thin layer of petroleum jelly in a donut shape, so the center of the picture would still be sharp. Aiming it at the flower made it fairly easy to arrange this photo. Unlike most of my photos – this one was not manipulated in any digital way, preserving the original just as film shooters were doing.
This is easy to try by yourself. Play with it – it is fun. Much more fun than manipulating pixels (says the geek J).