Vertical Panorama

Lois Conner carved her niche in photography by using a banquet camera to create amazing panoramic pictures of landscapes. The majority of her work is horizontal panorama, but there are some very beautiful vertical works. Her work inspired me to go out and give it a try.

Of course, a banquet camera, which Conner uses, is a very specialized piece of equipment. I aimed to make a similar product using some digital tech. I started out with the images below.

So now for the technical part: In Photoshop, hit Alt, then F, and then U. (Yes, it's very amusing.) In the Automate menu that opens, select "Photomerge," and there you have it: a menu that allows you to select the pictures that will become your panoramic image. Select them, hit OK, and you're rolling! This process in memory-intensive, so please be patient.

Photoshop, like a banquet camera, is complicated and expensive. I suggest trying out the free version of Photoshop, Autostitch -- a great tool for making panos. Should any of you need help with this, or Mac panorama software, I'll be happy to help out; just leave a comment.

No matter which piece of software you use, your results will probably have some distortion. What I usually do is crop the final product to a vertical rectangle shape that I like. Again, if you need help with cropping, please let me know and I can make a suggestion. Now, for the final product!

I encourage readers interested in this process to make images! I would be happy to post them and share in some reflected glory. But if you have questions, please leave a comment and I'll get back to you.

Central Park

For a long while I've wanted to make images that contained two different times of day. The white figure in this image is lit by ambient evening light and the colorful figure is lit by direct sunset light. Looks pretty slick in black and white as well. What's the theme? I'd say it's about protecting one's self from cute, transparent contamination.