Exciting New Project – “Semi-panos”

I’ve been rather pent up in creating new work. I’ve been working with a camera quite a bit less in recent months as I’ve been so busy with production, with the business of selling photographs. However, my method of “tickling” interesting images from my catalog is relentless, popping images into my awareness and compelling some attention.

I’ve done panoramas for several years, compelled at first by the prospect of getting more resolution from my early digital cameras, and also to include broad landscapes in places like Iceland. I printed them large, both because I had the resolution and often the sense of space demanded it. It made a canvas with opportunity to create both a sense of big space and also a play with negative space, emptiness. Here are a few of my panoramas that have made great big prints and demonstrating these principles:

One Cow, Thirteen Haybales, Iceland
One Cow Thirteen Haybales, Iceland

and

Rock Puddle and Connecticut River Foliage Reflections Panorama

But besides my approach to panoramas that is more “traditional” to photography, I have, since I can remember, appreciated panoramas in Oriental art. I think some of that comes through in both of these, the negative space in the top one, the overall composition of the bottom one.

Both Chinese and Japanese art has understood for millenia that a panorama image affords a different kind of visual pattern from a rectangular image. The eye moves differently, and therefore so does the mind, the emotional resonance. It’s easy to find:

Chinese

and Japanese (Hiroshige):

Hiroshige Woodblock

In the above, Hiroshige example, another important point is introduced: a vertical panorama composition. Very effective in a lot of oriental art.

So, the thing I’ve been working on is that since I’ve had high resolution cameras, I have enough resolution to create a panorama without stitching multiple exposures. I can re-vision images that I made as a rectangular image. And of course in photography all I can capture is the rectangle, even if what I see of interest is a square or a more narrow area of interest or composition, a sub-rectangle. I don’t print these as large. I’m calling them “semi-panos” to designate that they are from one file, whether a medium or high resolution file. I won’t print them as large — some of my panoramas could be quite large, especially with my newer large format printer. But what I’m working on is more intimate, and will be printed smaller.

I’ve already printed a few in the last year:

New Ice and Birch Reflections Semi-Pano
Eight Birch Reflections, Autum, Leaf Splash Circle

I don’t have these below for sale on the site, or really fully realized in many cases, but I’m growing a large collection I’ve already cropped and flagged to work on. In process:

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