Panoramas

PANORAMAS

I’ve always been interested in panoramas as a way to widen perspective within an image beyond simply using a wide angle lens.

Special (film) cameras like the Horizon and the legendary Widelux are specially designed with a rotating lens, which sweeps around in front of a curved film plane, to render a normal perspective with a long thin field of view. The result is very pleasing.

The problem with using a normal angle lens is when the horizontal sweep is longer than a panorama camera will allow (usually 120 degrees). Attempting a view of 180 to 360º (or even further) requires overlapping images and using ‘photomerge’ (stitching) in Photoshop. This works pretty well, unless you are so close that using a wide-angle lens will show too diverse a series of different perspective shapes at the edges of each image, to render together.

My latest epiphany with panoramas came when I was at St. Paul’s cathedral to support ‘Occupy London’ on the first day (October 15th). Standing on the steps of St. Paul’s, I wanted to do a wide sweep to show the large number of people, and did a hand-held series of overlapping images of about 180 degrees, which I was pleased to find later, actually worked as a stitched image (below). Experimenting with my tripod and a my first 360º panorama in wide-angle, using more images and much more overlap than normal, seemed to work as well.

The idea of doing a 360º panorama every day to support ‘Occupy London’ came out of exploring ideas around circles, complete responsibility; being the 100º instead of the Occupy logo ‘We are the 99 percent” (see Dr. Hew Len and ‘Hooponoppo’ and self identity), and also working with the ideas of Aristotle, that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. On a specific level, engaging in a 360º panorama that incorporates parts of the same image that will show at both ends, over different time scales, also suggests time travel and the relativity of space-time continuums, which is fun 🙂

As well as continuing with the (almost) daily work at St. Paul’s (a motorcycle accident on Oct 27th resulted in a broken motorbike, hand, two  cameras and two lenses), which images are all called ‘Occupy London’, I am also taking the camera and tripod out to other parts of London, and by doing slow sweeps with long shutter speeds, am engaging in another set of panoramas, with 360-plusº sweeps of wide areas, with effectively no or few people showing. I call these my ‘Unoccupied London’ series.

My instinct is that this new genre for me, rendering huge files of sometimes 200 or more images in one stitch, has a real commercial viability. Shot in raw, the images are too big to render in Photoshop, and must be resized to much smaller jpegs for Photoshop to handle them. But I am imagining full-scale images, ten feet by 120 feet, as an appealing exhibition concept. Work in progress, with much energy. Enjoy!

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