Best of 2014: November

        

Home of the Wounded Healer III

I began the year at the quarry, and I was back in November. The light on this occasion--a late afternoon--brought out the dark turquoise of the water and the magenta hues in the landscape.

This panorama is stitched together of three shots. But unlike most panos made by joining shots in a string, I have left the edges of the photos unaligned. Indeed, I shot the sequence with precisely this form of pano creation in mind.

When I posted this pano on Google+, I expected some comment or curiosity about that, but in fact the image received little response. Very little. I was surprised. And disappointed.

Maybe people thought it was just carelessness or laziness, or that I don't know "the right way" to create a pano by stitching shots in a string. Not true.

Indeed, doing it this way is much harder and more time-consuming because the seams must be adjusted and all of the detail work of making them invisible must be done manually, a few pixels at a time. Photoshop has a built-in, automatic stitching feature, but it assumes the edges of the photos are to be aligned. You can't use it to create this.

So... what's my point? Just that whereas I want my landscapes to be accurate representations, I also like the reminder of the unaligned edges of the pano that this is, indeed, a photographic interpretation of that landscape. I want the viewer to see where the seams are, but at the same time unable to actually SEE the seams.

In sum, I want some tension between a highly realistic representation of a landscape and a photographic interpretation of it that perhaps invites viewers to contemplate the nature and relationships among representation, interpretation and photography.

'Nuff said. Like it or leave it!