Miscellanea but interesting, 22nd November 2009

-- JohnAshford - 23 Nov 2009

This image is called "In The Beginning Was Chaos ..."

In case it's not obvious, the subject is the church of St.Lawrence in Waltham St.Lawrence, photographed on a glorious sunny day in March 2007. The road on the left and the road on the right are both Halls Lane, which is essentially straight; the image occupies a 180-degree field of view.

I originally took 30 separate photos, and merged them using PTAssembler to produce one big panoramic image. The end product is approximately 150 megapixels, and it's nice ... but after a while I found myself getting a bit bored with it. It seemed to me that, unless I were to make a huuuuuge print of it, it's all a bit of a waste of time producing such a large image with so much detail. Plus, the stitching and blending software is so good, it's really almost impossible to tell that the panorama is made from so many images. (The pixel count and angle of view give the game away to the trained eye, but most people wouldn't appreciate that.)

So I thought it might be fun to try to recreate the way I used to do panoramas in the pre-digital days, by overlapping a lot of prints. And so now we've got a sort of progression from a higgledy-piggledy pile of separate images ("chaos"), through an intermediate phase where the images have been more-or-less aligned but not "fused" together, through to the final merged version. The right-most third of this final image is the finished panorama, and I layered about 20 of the component images on top of that and moved them around until I had the effect I was after.

I hope it was worth it! I've never made a print this large, and I'm really pleased by how good it looks at 36 x 18". I initially felt a bit embarrassed that it would occupy a whole frame at Sainsbury's, but now that I've seen it in situ I'm much less embarrassed.

I've also been bitten by some sort of big-print-bug. I've created lots of big panoramic images over the last few years, and I think I'll have to start getting some of them printed as big as this. Any chance of filling the Sainsburys gallery with just 5 or 6 big panoramas?

-- StewartRobertson - 11 Dec 2009