reflection on panorama project

The panoramic project was an interesting introduction to a new format/technique of photography, difficult for me because it is a completely different frame with which to view the world. When taking photographs, or even just looking around on an everyday basis, I am constantly putting a photographic or film framing around everything, making compositions in my head. However, I cannot as easily do this for a panoramic; I can take a wider view of something, but cannot see the distortion that will appear in a photograph.

For this reason, I experimented a lot and took many different panoramic scenes to explore how they would turn out. One of the immediate things I thought of when out shooting was to take vertical panoramas. I thought this would be an interesting way to see the world. We are accustomed to gazing at a landscape/scene and panning just slightly or looking out of the corner of our eye to get a wider picture; however, what we do not register as often it the up and down “landscapes” around us. 

I was pleased with the way my vertical panorama of the stacks turned out, but did not chose it for my final print because I thought the tide pool imagery added was unnecessary. It seemed like a fitting and conceivable subject – I could image sea life under those translucent tiles – but to this image, already distorted by the format, I felt it did not add anything, and perhaps even detracted from the overpowering luminescence of the tiles. This is why I decided to go with the horizontal format, feeling that the manipulated length added in the middle hallway complimented it. Hearing feedback, I would like to go back and merge the two formats, but I am unsure what would happen when the bowing distortion of the vertical combined with the spanning view of the horizontal. Overall, I think it was an intriguing project, but now that I have a better sense of panoramas, I think future forays would have more of a discernable direction. I would also like to try more vertical panoramas, I like the alternative slice they offer.