Stitching panoramas and things

When my wife Margaret and I were first married back in 1975, our first house was in Southampton.  It was even by those days' standards a cheap starter home, and yet it had a marvellous water view.  Our house was on the outside of a bend of the River Itchen, and we had a marvellous view of Southampton Docks which meant that once a fortnight we would get the most wonderful view of the QE2 without leaving the house!  I mention this only because it was years before digital photography and software existed, and the panorama I made was cut to size and stuck together with sticky tape.

As you can see, or rather not see, in spite of levelling,cropping and fiddling with the colour and exposure, these 39 year-old pictures on cheap colour film, processed in goodness knows what conditions and picked up from the chemists, is at best a record shot which shows how lucky we were, without being really aware of it.  What developer today would even build three bedroom semi detached houses on a site like that?  There were always tons of interesting things, huge Black Backed Gulls (you can just see one in the third picture along)  which not only fished, but had the nasty habit of eating not just fish, but other birds eggs and hatchlings.

Ocean Liners, then still in existence, sailed off to New York, and South Africa, ferries went to Cherbourg and Le Havre, and the red hulled Antarctic Survey Vessels used to moor right opposite us during the Southern Winter.

I didn't even think of doing panorama shots again until the digital age and the advent of picture processing technology.  Below is a picture of Sydney Harbour from Fort Denison, the last Martello Tower to be built in the world as a defence against the French.  Presumably no-one told the locals that the French had been defeated at Waterloo in 1815, almost forty years previously, and Napoleon had already died on St Helena before the fort was built!

Mentioning Napoleon, he very nearly came to Sydney.  The Comte de la Perouse wanted to choose his officers for his world round trip from the Ecole Militaire in Paris.  A small Corsican named Bonaparte failed the interview, otherwise he would have reached Botany Bay in January 1788, literally only about two days after Captain Philip arrived with the first settlers and convicts.

But back to panoramas.

These days digital cameras and even some phones, have a panorama button, which one presses while moving the apparatus smoothly.  I don't have a steady hand, and so I take my panoramas using individual shots which I stitch together using software.

This is the one that I took from Fort Denison.  You can see that it is composed from six or seven standard photos.

As you can see, there are a number of extraneous bits around the edge which need cropping out, and various adjustments need to be made to the panoramic shot before it is finally cropped.

People pay over $1000 per plate to have a New Year's Eve Dinner here, but then the view of the world-famous Sydney fireworks is totally unobstructed, and there are no huge crowds to contend with.

Just to orient you, on the South side of the Harbour (actually called Port Jackson), on the left is the Sydney Tower and the rest of the centre of Sydney; the Opera House, which is built on the site of an old Tram Depot at Bennelong Point, and finally the magnificent Harbour Bridge, built as a Depression project at the end of the 20s/early 30s.  It was built on a grand scale in spite of there being comparatively limited traffic.  Today it has six lanes of roads and a two track railway, and a walkway on one side and a cycle path on the other.  For many years it was the widest bridge in the world.  What wonderful forward planning!

But now I'm going to put in a photographic interval.

As I'm not a very good photographer, because physically I have a tremor, I always get a small amount of camera shake.  As a result I like to play about and experiment perhaps a little more than most.

Below is probably the most important photo I have ever taken, not because it is artistic because it isn't; not because it is particularly good, because it isn't.  It is the end of our street taken with a series of photos that have been stitched together in two directions.  A two-dimensional panorama.

I haven't counted, but there must be approximately twenty exposures in this picture.  But there was another important result for me.  I printed off the individual shots as 6 x 4 s and glued them together to make a large picture of the scene.  So successful was this experiment, that within the month, I tackled a far larger project.

I went with a couple of Club members, Alan and Jenny, to the Bridge museum in the south east pylon of the Sydney Harbour Bridge (the bridge tower nearest the Opera House) and took a lot of shots to stitch together, if possible, to form a two-dimensional picture.

And this is it.  My best and largest two dimensional picture of the Sydney Harbour Bridge from the south east pylon.  You will notice that it is an unusual view of the bridge (hereafter known as the SHB) because you are quite high up so that it appears that you are looking down on the arch, but as it soon became evident, there was another problem.  The picture was slightly portrait formatted!

Once again I decided to try the 6 x 4 technique, but this time I printed them in sepia, as being more appropriate for a middle-aged engineering marvel.

Actually I did it because the light was extremely flat, and sepia gave me a greater tonal range.  Then to increase the challenge I took each 6 x 4 and cut it into five two centimetre strips, and glued it together like a giant collage.  To give you an idea of the scale of the finished work before framing, I have included the photo of the SHB picture below.

This happy result has a down side, though.  Because the collage of the SHB was such a success, I was encouraged to do a similar picture of the Sydney Opera House, so that they could hang next to each other.

But that, we are all relieved to hear, is another story.

Minimalism again of sorts?

One of the few things that I found out by trial and error is that if you have a famous object, building, ship, whatever, it's counterproductive usually to put the whole object into the frame.  It gives more depth to a picture if you have a fairly ordinary street scene for instance, so that you look at the street with its cars and houses, and all of a sudden, you say, "Is that a bit of the Sydney Harbour Bridge I can see in the far distance?"  This leads your eye into the picture and (usually) gives it far more impact than a record photo of the SHB with some tourists in front of it.

There is a hill in the Rocks area of old Sydney, called Observatory Hill.  There is a reason that many ports have observatories near their harbours, but now is not to mention why.

Suffice to say that I took a picture of part of the Bridge arch which came out quite well, and while writing this entry made a discovery.  The first photo is the one with am impact, but the second one has less of the Bridge, but bigger, and this seems to have got even more impact.  Although you can see comparatively little of the Bridge, most people would know it was a close up of the "Coat Hanger".

After I had taken this shot, I descended to the shore via several sets of sandstone steps.  When I got to the bottom I found that I had twisted my knee. But I had got my shot!

Call this a bridge?

This is a bridge!

A great example of less is more.

I'm basically a self taught photographer, and although I had made a few forays into the black arts in industrial and scientific photography, I didn't really make it a major hobby of mine until the digital era.

When I started I would show my snaps to my friends who naturally admired them because they were my friends, and it got to the stage where I had to say to them "I KNOW there's something wrong with this photo, but I can't quite see what it is"  They would then tell me in no uncertain terms that it was a lovely photo except that I had cut off a man's head or something equally trivial.

I really believed that I could take good photos (and in fairness some were good, but many were not.)  I compiled a blog called "Berowra Photos" in all seriousness, with photos that I thought were good at the time, with text that would give a 14 year-old boy a B grade in English.  It is still googlable.

I am embarrassed by it now, but it does have one value, I think.  It shows the progress, or otherwise, of an aspiring photographer from mediocrity to quite good mediocrity.

It was then that I decided that I would join a Camera Club.  I had no idea what they did, but it struck me that instead of just asking family and friends to give me their opinions, I would get opinions from fellow photographers.

In fact I got far more than that.  Other photographers gave me ideas as well as telling me how I could sort out problems that inevitably arise.  It put me in contact with judges, which also gave me valuable information, and also it helped the most critical judge of all, myself, to see how my photos measured up against the photographs exhibited by the rest of the club.

Every other month we have a theme for our Club competition.  On this occasion it was Street Photography.  I have two problems with this, both fundamental.  I am too shy to ask complete strangers for permission to take their photos, and also I find it a bit of an intrusion that affects people's privacy.  But that's just my opinion.  Many people record the human condition and do it well.

Anyway, a friend of mine and her family decided we would all go into the centre of Sydney by train to do some evening street photography.

You will see that Sydney trains are double deckers.  When you come in through the doors, there is a small area at platform level with some seating and then you either go up or down a few steps into the main decks of the carriage.  We went downstairs, and Jenny, my companion, pointed to the girl and said "There's a photo there!"  You can see that the young lady in this photo is wearing ridiculously high heeled shoes which contrast strongly with the yellow trim of the carriage.  I took the photo and after three edits I cropped it down to give this.

I would never have thought of taking this strong picture if it had not been for the fellow club member Jenny suggesting it, and for the expertise that I had gained generally from other club members.

It did quite well in our annual inter club competition against Pittwater Camera Club, whom we let win on a yearly basis.  It's called "Berowra Blackfoot" and you'll be relieved to know has nothing at all to do with Fontana, or American 

Ind - igneous people.

A spaceman and a correction about a Frenchman

This spaceman was no Yuri Gagarin or John Glenn or the guy who famously told Houston that they had a problem.  No this was the art teacher from Buenos Aires, Argentina, called Fontana, who was fascinated by space in pictures so much that eventually, he gave up on paint and looked just at the space instead.

Every time I visit this piece of art in the Tate Modern in London, I could quite easily stand in front of it for an hour or so.  What fascinates me, even after several viewings is the perfection of this image.  It consists of just one pre-considered slash at the stretched canvas, just one stroke only.  That is as minimalist as you can get!  But the perfection I mentioned above.  I have looked at this image for probably two hours in total (on one occasion when I was in a hurry, it was the only artwork I had time to see!), and I can not imagine that slash to be any other length, any other curvature or at any other point on the canvas.  It is quite simply perfect.  Space needs an object as much as an object needs space in an image.  The object here is obviously the cut in the canvas.  But for me, this is the uncanny thing.  The spaces are by no means the same shape or area or anything, they do not rest on thirds, yet they are perfectly balanced by the cut.

I find the whole work of art mesmerising.  Maybe I like minimalism or maybe I'm a Fontana freak, but it's got the "Wow" factor in spades! 

It's got a nice frame as well!

Now a correction of my last post.  The famous picture to which I alluded was "The Decisive Moment" snapped just outside the Gare St Lazare in Paris in the 1930s by Henri Cartier-Bresson who later wrote a book about how there is a decisive moment when the shutter moves which gives the perfect picture.  You can see his photograph on Google Images.  My poor imitation is therefore "The Ill-Defined Moment"

But back to Cockatoo Island where we left our galvo shed with the down pipe, swirled around in blue and pink.  The problem with swirling, or to be technical, using a polar co-ordinate filter, is that there is always a join mark that has to be disguised.  I thought about it a bit, and realised that my grey coloured pic of the shed would have to go over it.  This posed a problem of space, and so I got round this by making the swirl one quarter of a flag.  So as I needed four quarters I did a black and white version; a solarised version; solarised with a swirl; and solarised with a ripple, which makes it look very indigenous.  Then I put the original photo on the top.  It looked ghastly, with all the angles being right angles.  But when I put the original pic at an angle, the whole composition was transformed.

The thing is, do I put it in one of our Open competitions, or do I have the patience to wait a few months and put it in our Special Effects comp?

Well, I like it, even if nobody else does!

Three photos, two artists and a guy who takes rotten pictures

Guess I'm still smarting a bit about my minimalist piccy of the fire hydrant.  Not appreciated by the judge, but I am told something similar is adorning the walls of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.  Hey ho! It's all a matter of taste I guess.

Anyway, I went back to Cockatoo Island with fellow club member Jenny and while she took some good pics I played in the puddles.  Those of you who remember the works of that famous French photographer "Vous connaissez l'homme la" and his photo "The Decisive Step"  Well, this isn't it.  So I'll call mine "le pas indecisif"  Excuse the lack of cedillas and accents.

Then I thought to myself, I'll show them what a minimalist picture can look like." Well, it looks rather like a metal down pipe attached to a corrugated iron wall as you can see.

The decision to manufacture this image was to extoll the energy in upwardly forced perspectives while at the same time attempting to show the downward balancing energy that is found in every system; here the resonance is allegorised by falling rain that is itself exemplified by the sole down pipe, emphatically uncorrected for lens distortion.  It is represented by a slight slash, a Saracen arc, if you will, that showcases the one feature in this otherwise barren minimalist landscape.  It celebrates Fontana, the great Argentine slasher whose incisive work is in Tate Modern in London.

Minimalism?  I'll show you minimalism!

We've got a competition later in the year on Special Effects so I may put the following picture in.

Fun, isn't it?  As you've probably already guessed, it is the above minimalist piccy with one or two little tweaks along the way.  The down pipe is at about 6 o'clock.

And Fontana was an Argentine artist who specialised in cutting canvas quickly yet decisively to show balanced space.  Every time I visit London I make a pilgrimage to Tate Modern to see his profoundly simple, clever, and beautiful work.

Seriously.  I do.

About a year ago I went to a place on that schizophrenic river the Hawkesbury/ Nepean.

Apparently it got its name(s) from early explorers finding a south to north river which they named the Nepean and a west to east river which they named after a tiny village in Gloucestershire and thus became known as the Hawkesbury River.  They are of course one and the same river, and the bridge near Yarramundi Reserve is the place where the river changes its name.

I went with some friends VERY early in the morning and saw this pelican through the morning gloom at first light.  I call it "White Bird".  This is more or less how it came out of the camera, tweaked for brightness, contrast and saturation, but no arty farty stuff done to it at all.

 

Maybe you had to be there to appreciate it!

Those of you who are members of the Hornsby Heights Camera Club, won't have to guess who my companion was on our trip to Cockatoo Island. :)

This is a reflection of the 19th century Mort's Dock steam crane in a puddle.

Back to proper photography.  I seem to be on my way towards minimalism in my old age.  I went with a friend to the Sydney Biennale on Cockatoo Island, an old derelict shipyard in Sydney Harbour.  This was just a fire hose next to a galvo (galvanised iron to non-Aussies) shed.  The most difficult bit when processing the shot was to try and get rid of the camera lens distortion. which was very obvious with all the vertical lines.  I took it with an 18-270 zoom which I keep on the front of the camera for versatility and also to keep the dust off the sensor.  Unfortunately all zooms are compromises, so next time I'm over on the Island, I'll have to snap the same scene again using either my prime 35mm 

f 1.8 or else my macro 60mm f 2 which should have far less distortion.