Panoramic

A picture may indeed be worth a thousand words, but sometimes you need more than one photo to adequately describe a place, and if you don't have a wide angle lens you may just have to shoot several photos and patch them together to get a panorama.

(click on these pictures to see much larger versions of them)

Now, you can do this like David Hockney with actual physical prints, or you can use software if you're shooting digital photos (or scanning your prints). There are several programs that can do this for you, but I used Photoshop to stitch my digital pics (Photoshop itself has a feature that merges similar areas in a group of photos to give you a panorama, but I wanted to do this myself). Incidentally, I climbed our TV aerial to get the high angle in the above image of our outbuildings and silo.

The technique I used for these was simply panning the camera from left to right (or vice versa), and stopping to take a shot at regular intervals, making sure the pictures overlap a bit. In the above shot (front yard, house, outbuildings, silo, The Hesperus, and the rest of the front yard), I went from left to right, catching Krista as she returns from picking up the mail (she's on the far left, almost exactly between the white posts that will soon display our Small Pond sign and the red cap of our well).

I caught Krista again in the above shot of our clearing in the woods. For this, I tucked myself into a "corner" of the clearing and shot from left to right. I thought about standing in the centre and trying to get a 360-degree panorama, but I didn't think that would convey the beauty of this area, so I just went with this simple shot.

Below are panoramic pictures of our rooms for residencies. Again, a panorama helps get a better sense of a place --in this case, cozy rooms-- and helps to avoid the sense of smallness and claustrophobia that a single photo normally creates. Now, the rooms may look a little distorted, but you get the idea.

Speaking of distortion, here is a montage of the source photos I used to make two panoramas of the Blue Room:

With a lot of distortion and digital torture, I managed to force the above pictures into the coherent panoramas below:

Of course, if you look very closely, you can figure out where the seams are, usually due to colour variation.

But that's not the point.

The painting on the side of the garage in the first photo (hello jimmy), and the long vertical paintings in both the Gold Room (General Mayhem) and the Yellow Room (I don't fit this shoe) are by Alberta artist Dean Stanton.
The painting of the urn in the Gold Room is by Mae Dalby, Krista's great aunt.