A different sort of panorama

When most people hear panorama, they think landscapes. A big sky, faraway horizon, expansive view, something interesting in the foreground, maybe some majestic mountains or a reflective lake.

But I've been lately thinking about something smaller, triggered by trying to find composition in driftwood, and thinking about scale in abstract images. Even though many people seem trapped in 'bigger is better', I'm quite sure that's not always true. For a photograph, what matters is that it's interesting to look at. I'm thinking of ways of making a micro-landscape panorama interesting.

On the panorama front I had a brainwave the other day while walking through Fish Creek when I found a fallen tree full of interesting textures. I thought if I did it right, I could walk along the tree taking photos as I went, then stitch them together to get a wider look at the log.

A bit of a digression to bring you up to speed on terminology for the rest of the blog. Aspect ratio; expressed as width to height, is the word we need. We often see computer monitors and TV screens as 16:9, meaning it's 16 units wide by 9 units high, or 1.77:1, and they used to be 4:3, or 1.33:1. It would be a cruel trick is to sell a product measured in cm rather than inches, but I digress within a digression. The older of my local readers may remember the Cinemascope theatre in North Hill Mall, able to show films with an aspect ration between 2.35:1 to 2.66:1. The curved screen was sort of trippy. As a digression I saw Apocalypse Now there, and it was weird to see the helicopters curving in and out of the top of the screen. It closed in 1999.

From a photographer's perspective, the different aspect ratios can give quite a different feel to the photograph. 8x10 is a common size for portraits. The native aspect ratio for my camera is 3:2, though I can set it to shoot 4:3, 16:9, or 1:1. Easy enough to crop after the fact. Let us not digress into the purist photographic argument that better composition eliminates the need for cropping.

Many of you are probably familiar with shooting a panorama on your cell phone. Point, click, swivel a bit, click, swivel a bit more, click, until you're tired of it. There can be distortions in such images. The phone compresses the image so all the image is there, often with weird borders or distortions of straight lines. My camera works the same way, although the processing is different. That software tries to preserve the larger image, so you want to make sure the top and bottom line up.

So let's get started. Here's a 16:9 to get both a sense of that aspect ratio and what I'm talking about when I say micro-landscape. I'm tempted to go back with my tripod and carefully set up to get a really good quality panorama, stitching several photos together.

 Of course, as the panorama gets wider, the apparent height of the image shrinks so you can see the entire image on screen. When you print such a thing, it shows up in all it's glory. Here's three panoramas that probably won't look good on your phone unless you zoom and scroll, but they look lovely on my big photo editing screen. Yes they are all the same log, and yes I tried to stitch all 24 images together. (Fail!) There is another 4.1:1 panorama from the far right end of the log as I looked at it, but it isn't interesting to me as an image.

This one is 2.3:1. This is Cinemascope territory.

This one is 3.35:1.

This is 4:1

A panorama need not be horizontal, though you have to be more careful about perspective. We found this tree at the Conglomorant Cliffs in Cypress Hills.  There was some interesting grain, but we couldn't get close to it because of the unstable hillside. That's the only reason the perspective works here, because I was about mid-point for the height of the tree.

Then one can get completely carried away with panoramas. This is 7.5:1, and is the widest I've ever successfully merged photos for. There are 8 photos stitched together, done freehand, taking up about a quarter of the horizon. I don't know how I avoided perspective issues.

As an aside, I'm really pleased I kept 90% of the vertical pixels available to me in landscape. Really, though, the problem is this is too wide for a screen. One can't appreciate the detail in it, till you blow the original up to 100% and scroll. This would print out almost 8 feet wide by 1 foot high at 300 dpi, and look stunning down a long hallway. This was shot at Red Rocks. Sean is somewhere behind me.

Rock of the Day
Now I am into the shots I took during my visit with Sean. These two are taken almost exactly the same place and within a few minutes of each other, with similar processing. I liked the gap between the rocks.

Driftwood of the day