Rough as guts panorama of my desk
- At July 25, 2008
- By Neil Creek
- In Experimental
7
Tuesday, while at Mike’s place admiring his beautiful aquarium, I saw this cool photo collage he had on his wall, of a pretty seaside building made with many overlapping photos. I thought it was a very cool idea. Kind of like a rough panorama. Then yesterday browsing through one of the blogs I follow, I saw this post which reminded me I’d seen this kind of stuff online before.
Laurie linked to some of Heather Champ’s photos on Flickr as her inspiration, and these were so cool, that I just had to have a go myself.
It was late, the light was terrible, but I didn’t mind. I figured the rough, rushed look was part of what made these composites cool. So I grabbed my camera, stuck on the 50mm lens, set to f1.8 at 1/50th and ISO1600, and quickly and deliberately roughly took a couple dozen photos of my desk to stick together.
I couldn’t help myself but use the panorama stitching software to join them together. It made the alignment pretty simple, but it warped the photos to fit, as well as colour corrected and blended the photos. Normally you want this for a panorama, but the appeal of these photos is their inaccuracies.
Overall I’m happy with the result, but next time I’ll leave the camera on auto everything, including focus, and I’ll put them all together in photoshop, for that hand-made collage look.
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laanba
I like the warped look here too. The fun thing about these is that the inaccuracies are part of their charm so it takes some of the pressure off for perfection. Glad I could inspire you. We all inspire each other which is what makes the internet fun.
the_wolf_brigade
The weirdest thing is that today I was reading “The Photography Book” (1997) by Ian Jeffery and came across a shot by David Hockney taken in 1982 that is exactly this technique, reminding me of the many Zeb Andrews has posted on flickr done with a Holga.
I have long wanted to try this technique and have actually organised a family trip to a favourite location tomorrow to try out this technique with a plastic lensed camera myself…
How coincidental I read your post just after! Yours looks very “Alice in Wonderland” like.
Scott Coulter
Neil,
The other term that is often used for creations like this is “panography” or (the French version, I presume) “panografie”.
There’s a flickr group here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/panography
I haven’t tried one yet, but I intend to soon.
–sdc
Susheel Chandradhas
Neil,
Here’s a couple of my “desk photos” taken in a more “Hockneyish” style This is one and that’s the other.
Neil Creek
Thanks for the comments folks, especially Scott for that fantastic link. I’ve joined the group! Susheel, very cool take on the classic “desk shot” too :)
andar909
hi, andar here, i just read your post. i like very much. agree to you, sir.
Thingomy
May I ask what pano stitching software you use?