Panography

Reflecting on yesterday’s tutorial with Holger Pooten, I decided to do some research into some photographers and artists that use panography within their work. There are many ways that a 360º panorama can be captured and displayed, some of which are inventive and particularly eye-catching.

Mareen Fischinger

Mareen Fischinger is a German photographer and has a passion for everything that involves photography. As well as being a photographer, Fischinger is also involved with photo production services for national and international clients, including art direction, casting, booking of make-up/hair & styling, location scouting and retouching services. Her panographic images caught my attention, not only because they are aesthetically beautiful but because they are abstract in their nature and they have made me think about the other ways in which I can approach my work when shooting a landscape scene.

© Mareen Fischinger

© Mareen Fischinger

© Mareen Fischinger

The first image reminds me of one of my own images that I shall be using for my final assessment. My image also contains office buildings which are similar in their architectural style and I also have a crane present within my image.

As I had some images with me during the Photoshop tutorial, Holger suggested that I played around with these to experiment working in a similar style. We kept the images in a sphere shape (in keeping with my stereographic images) but in hindsight I think that the experiment would have looked better laid out from left to right.

Experiment with Holger

Image created with the help of Holger Pooten. Images © Richard Brochu-Williams

Holger showed me new techniques and methods within Photoshop that will come in very useful for future experimentations & creations.

Sven Fennema

Whilst researching I came across another photographer & artist by the name of Sven Fennema. Sven has an interest in landscape and architectural photography and is inspired by the geometry of buildings, their shapes and their lines. I have noticed that on his website he has also included panoramic tours, this is something that I experimented with back in April this year but I was unable to upload the tour that I created to this blog.

© Sven Fennema

Virtual Tours

Virtual Tours 2

I have also looked into the work of David Hockney, who also has created landscapes from multiple images. Due to copyright I cannot post any of his work to this blog but his images can be viewed on his website.

What I like about the images that I have found during my investigation, is the fact that they are stitched together rather crudely and not seamlessly (with the exception of Sven Fennema) and in my opinion this adds to the aesthetic properties of the image and creates an illusion of texture. This is definitely a technique that I will be experimenting with in the future. It’s a shame that I do not have enough time to experiment with this technique fully at the present time, as I feel that I could have produced some good work from using these methods.

References

4rtgallery.blogspot.com, (2014). Simply Creative: Panography by Mareen Fischinger. [online] Available at: http://4rtgallery.blogspot.com/2013/06/panography-by-mareen-fischinger.html [Accessed 5 Aug. 2014].

Hockneypictures.com, (2014). DAVID HOCKNEY. [online] Available at: http://www.hockneypictures.com [Accessed 6 Aug. 2014].

Mareen Fischinger Fotografie, (2014). Mareen Fischinger Fotografie. [online] Available at: http://mareenfischinger.com/places/panography/ [Accessed 5 Aug. 2014].

Sven Fennema – Fine Art Photography | Panorama – Fotografie, (2012). 360° Panography. [online] Available at: http://www.sven-fennema.de/panography/ [Accessed 6 Aug. 2014].

Wikipedia, (2014). Panography. [online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panography [Accessed 6 Aug. 2014].

Photoshop Tutorials with Holger Pooten

Earlier this week our MA Photography group had a Photoshop tutorial with photographer Holger Pooten. This I found to be very useful as I use Photoshop often within my practice. Just when you think that you know all there is to know about the Photoshop software, you find out that there are more techniques than you had originally thought. It is believed that most photographers only use a small percentage of Photoshops editing tools and these will be specific to the type of photography that they are involved with.

We began by looking at colour management:

We discussed the importance of calibrating your equipment so that you have a consistent workflow. However, calibrating your camera can be a little impractical, especially if you are shooting outside or taking pictures for documentary purposes. Calibrating your camera may be a good idea if you are primarily shooting in a studio with the same lighting set up. Corrections can be made in Photoshop. We also discussed the benefits of shooting in RAW.

We were shown the best way to deal with our RAW files whilst preparing and editing them in Photoshop.

The points highlighted are the most important and most commonly used.

The 4 most important elements within Photoshop are:

• Hue / Saturation
• Contrast
• Colour
• Brightness

I found this lesson to be really informative and surprisingly I did learn something new, as well as different ways (some easier) to complete a task. We will be continuing with more Photoshop Workshops next week and we are free to ask questions and seek advice on techniques that are specific to our final images for the upcoming Final Major Exhibition. I believe that we will be looking at Lightroom too.

References

Screen shoots are taken from a presentation compiled by Holger Pooten. His work can be viewed via the link below.

Holgerpooten.com, (2014). Holger Pooten Photography. [online] Available at: http://www.holgerpooten.com [Accessed 1 Aug. 2014].

X-Ray

Today I decided to experiment more with the X-ray themed pictures and to see what I could achieve with some new subjects. Todays shoot went a little easier than last time, thanks to the purchase of a new plate for my tripod I was no longer having to use a soup can to steady my top heavy camera

The set up used in todays shoot looked a little more professional than the last time I shot and I decided to use my studio flashes with the soft box.

Set-Up

Studio Set-Up

Flash

Camera with Speedlight set as Master

And then with a few clicks of the camera, uploading of images and a little bit of magic in Photoshop I managed to produce these images:

“What’s in The Bag?”
©Richard Brochu-Williams

“Show me the Money”
©Richard Brochu-Williams

All Images ©Richard Brochu-Williams, All rights reserved, 2013