August 2015

This Month's Photograph I took this panoramic photograph in New York City on the Upper West Side. I have experimented with panoramic photography for a number of years, trying a variety of approaches. I created this photograph using a digital mirrorless camera mounted on a tripod with a Really Right Stuff Panoramic head and editing it with Photomerge in Photoshop. I also use the Autostitch application to create images that might be considered freeform panoramics. My iBook "Autostitched 1.0" is now available for 99 cents from the iTunes stores. It is compatible with iTouch, iPhone, iPad and MacBooks. You need to have an iPad with iBooks 2 or later and iOS 5 or later, or an iPhone with iOS 8.4 or later, or a Mac with OS X 10.9 or later. You can see more of my panoramics at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/paullight/sets/72157633709957926/ You can see some of my autostitched photographs at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/paullight/sets/72157633378139401 and https://www.flickr.com/photos/paullight/sets/72157633259245123

July 2015

This Month's Photograph This photograph was made in Barcelona. Making photographs in Barcelona gave me my first opportunity to explore using Autostitch outside of the United States. I like to photograph things I have never noticed before. Never having been to Spain before, there was lots to notice. The Autostitch series is an extension of my work with panoramic photography, which I began in the early 1970s by pasting darkroom prints together. I continued the work in the 1980s using a 35mm camera with a built in panoramic mask and then in the 1990s using a view camera with a custom-designed panoramic film slide. In the early 2000s, I began to cut and repiece photographs using Adobe Photoshop. For the photographs in this series, I use a variety of cameras, as well an iPhone and an iPad. Each photograph is composed of several smaller photographs electronically pieced together using an algorithm created by Cloudburst Research and offered in the apps Autostitch and Calico.  Perspective and texture play a central role in all of my photography. In this series, I have perspective options that I never knew were possible. I have always liked wide angle lenses, as well as photo compositing techniques that give a similar perspective effect to wide angle lenses. The algorithms in AutoStitch and Calico enhance the possibilities that I previously only began to explore with lenses and photo compositing.