First, a final reminder that if you are in London tonight, Monday 16 June, you are welcome to come to the opening of my show with Hilary Rosen at the gallery in University College Hospital (details here.)
The show continues until the 30th July and I have two sets of six pictures, all panoramas. The first set were mainly made when I was working with two panoramic film cameras, the Hasselblad XPan and a considerably cheaper Russian Horizon 202.
The Hasselblad (actually a Fuji camera) received rave reviews, but at first I’d been a little disappointed. It came with a 45mm lens, which really didn’t give a very wide view. What really transformed it for me (though at high cost) was the 30mm, which with an angle of view of around 94 degrees stretched rectilinear perspective to its limits. Vignetting was absurd, and the already slow F5.6 lens needed always to be used with a centre spot filter, reducing the exposure in the middle of the frame, making the light transmission more like an f10 or fll lens. But as with most Fuji lenses it was superb, and the lens the widest rectilinear lens available for any ‘medium format’ camera – which the XPan essentially was despite using 35mm film, with its 24 x 65mm frame.
But although that kit probably cost something approaching 20 times as much as the Horizon 202 (by then I was onto my second one of these, I think £170 sent in a plain brown-paper parcel from a private address in the Ukraine) I think most of my best pictures were taken with this clockwork Russian swing-lens model.
It wasn’t just the wider angle of view – around 120 degrees – but the different perspective with the lens rotating about its centre to produce the image on film with the same centre of curvature (so keeping a constant lens centre to film distance and zero vignetting) that made it more interesting and more demanding to use. Stopped down to f5.6 or f8 the quality was similar to that of the Hasselblad too, and the negatives were quite similar in size. All except one of the six earlier pictures in the show was I think taken with the Horizon – and that sixth was made with a Nikon.
Not from the show, but a recent digital panorama from the Excalibur Estate in Catford
It’s taken me some time to really work out how best to work with a DSLR to make panoramic images. I did one project I like using Pt Gui and stitching multiple negatives. Its fine, but time-consuming and tricky with moving subjects, and needs fairly precise rotation around the nodal point if there are any really close objects in the scene – which is why many panoramas avoid any foreground. Images from a high viewpoint make life easy. But seldom makes for pictures that interest me.
Two road that meet at roughly a right angle. Excalibur Estate, Catford, 2014
The pictures from the Excalibur Estate in Catford that illustrate this post are my latest effort at producing digital panoramas. They have a horizontal angle of view of around 145 degrees and an aspect ration of 1.9:1, and almost all of them have plenty of foreground. None of these images have any moving objects in them, but that would cause no problem. And yes, I used PT Gui to make them.
Close objects are no problem. Excalibur Estate, Catford, 2014
I’m still working on the details – the images in the UCH show were made in a different way, and I keep having different ideas about how best to work, so it would perhaps be premature to give the details of how these were made, though it shouldn’t be difficult for anyone with a particular interest to work it out.
The Prefab Museum. Excalibur Estate, Catford, 2014
One of the empty pre-fabs on the Excalibur Estate has been transformed into a Prefab Museum, now open to the general public only on Saturdays (11am-5pm) and closing at the end of September. More details about this as well as a full set of 64 pictures from the historic estate, already part-demolished and most of the rest due to follow soon in Excalibur Estate on My London Diary
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My London Diary : Buildings of London : River Lea/Lee Valley : London’s Industrial Heritage
All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.
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