Horseshoe Bend Panorama essay

Introduction
In March 2008 I purchased a Phase One 45 digital back. This purchase was motivated in part by the desire to have large digital files to create fine art prints, and by the need to have equally large files for a commercial assignment that I worked on in Southern France in April.

Phase One's P45 comes in a variety of mounts designed to fit just about any medium format camera make or model. Since I had a complete V Hasselblad system (the traditional Hasselblads) I decided to get the V Hasselblad version of the P45. All the versions of the P45 are similar except for the mount which is specific to each camera manufacturer.

I will have a detailed report on my experiences working with the P45 soon so I won't go over the technical aspects of the back in this essay. Instead, here I want to focus on one particular use for this back and that is the creation of multi-image collages.


Why so big?
One could legitimately ask this question. The P45 generates 39 mp files, which equal an 18x24 print at 300 dpi without any upresing. With a simple 2x upres, which is considered to be a "normal" upres, the print size jumps to 40x50.

However, what I am talking about here are not single captures. What I am talking about are collages done from several P45 captures. For example, the image above Horseshoe Bend 2008, consists of 5 P45 captures stitched together using Photoshop CS3 Photomerge.

It's the composition!
Why do it? For the composition that is. The 5 photographs used for the collage above were done with a 38mm Zeiss Biogon. This is a wide lens, but I wanted to show more than the field of view it delivers. I wanted to show a panoramic view of the Horseshoe Bend in which I could include a lot of the foreground. The only way to do this was by taking several photographs and merging them.

Here comes Photomerge
If you haven't tried the CS3 version of Photomerge in CS3 (not the CS2 Version), and if you like collages, you ought to yourself to do so as soon as you can. The quality of the collages is awesome, and the ease of use is superb. I usually select the "auto" option, and in the few instances were it fails to deliver a good image, I select the "reposition only" option. Between the two I nearly always get a perfect result. Seamless images that look as if they were shot with a single shot although the look of the image tells you that such was not the case.

I use to have to use PT GUI and other specialized stitching software to get this type of results. Not anymore. In fact, I don't even use a panoramic setup. I simply place my camera on my ballhead, as I would for a normal shot, then pan from right to left. It helps if you level the tripod, but if you don't and you are careful to keep the horizon level, you will do just fine. I am not a software engineer, and I don't know how Photomerge works or what code lies behind the results I get, but all I can say is that whoever wrote the code and designed this software ought to get an award. It's that good.

It picks up where I left off. Somehow, it knows in which order the photographs go, and somehow it knows how to blend them together so that there is no evidence left that these are stitched single shots and not a regular photograph.

So the question remains, why not use a smaller format image file, such as Canon captures for example? Well, for one, because I can. After all, why not use the best equipment available? For two, because I love the image quality of the Phase One P45. I will have more on this later in my upcoming experience report, but for now let me just say that there is a quality of color and contrast that I have not experienced with other digital captures, regardless of size or brand. I haven't tested all the digital cameras or backs out there (I much prefer taking photographs to testing equipment) so my opinion is somewhat biased, but the fact remains that the image quality is the reason behind my choice of equipment when it comes to capturing images for stitching.

10 years apart
Before I close another point is worth making, and that is the reason why I want to create stitched images. Not how I create these images, but why I create these images.

If you are familiar with my work you probably know that I like to return to specific locations over and over again and that each time I return my goal is to create images that I have not created before. In other words, my goal is to find new compositions. Stitching is simply one of the ways I create new compositions. In other words, stitching is a way to compose images. What I mean here is not stitching in order to get higher resolution images, but stitching to get a composition you could not get otherwise. This is why.


Above is the first image I created of the Horseshoe Bend. This was back in 1998. Compare it to the one I created last month. The differences are all about how each image is composed and why they are composed the way they are.

Alain Briot
Arizona
May 2008


This essay originally appeared at this link:http://beautiful-landscape.com/Thoughts78-P45%20collages.html

Very impressive! This contribution is so appreciated Alain!

Asher

Asher,

You are welcome. I thought posting this essay here was a good idea, I am glad you agree. I actually found that formatting the essay was very easy using the forum formatting controls.

I just posted a image on my site (on the home page), also created with the P45 and also a collage (2 images this time). I am very much enjoying this approach and I am working towards a portfolio of P45 images.

Alain

Alain,
Very interesting work, I have a P25, -the 22mp version- and use it for work documenting art here in NY.

I will have the chance to do landscape work after I move to Bolivia.

What is your feeling of the images produced with the back as opposed with the ones with film? and how do you print them?

leonardobarreto.com said:

Alain,
What is your feeling of the images produced with the back as opposed with the ones with film? and how do you print them?

Click to expand...

I haven't really compared film to the p45 yet.

Regarding printing I print everything digitally. Is this what you are asking ?

YEAH, that's what I am talking about! Just stunning Alain!

I am having a little trouble understanding what you said here:

I simply place my camera on my ballhead, as I would for a normal shot, then pan from right to left. It helps if you level the tripod, but if you don't and you are careful to keep the horizon level, you will do just fine.

Click to expand...

So what you are saying is that stitching in CS3 has eliminated the need for a nodal point adjustment, using a pano head?

You just used a ballhead and panning from right to left did the job on this picture? Did I get that right?

Georg Baumann said:

YEAH, that's what I am talking about! Just stunning Alain!

I am having a little trouble understanding what you said here:

You just used a ballhead and panning from right to left did the job on this picture? Did I get that right?

Click to expand...

Yes, that's what I did. I also do that freehand when there's enough light.

Georg Baumann said:

So what you are saying is that stitching in CS3 has eliminated the need for a nodal point adjustment, using a pano head?

Click to expand...

Not necessarily. I am simply describing my current approach. Other photographers' approaches may vary, and most likely do vary. Mine might change as well. Nothing's set in stone here, or anywhere in art for that matter.

Georg,

For taking shots of distant landscape features, parallax problems are very small. If needed one can choose to crop pictures before hand to give only one choice for a near field object.

I do this all the time. I will lean the camera sometimes on the side of a tree or else just do it freehand trying to rotate the camera around the entrance pupil of the lens.

Asher

Great images, thanks for sharing all of this.

Thanks for this, quite impressive. I'm also pleased to read your endorsement of CS3's merge abilities. I have also been quite impressed, but haven't had a chance to work with files that large. I was worried that it would take too much correction between various lightings as the angle of the camera changes (this won't change that much, of course...)

Hi Yaron,

Photomerge kicks! I've actually done comparisons between stitching in CS3 and PT Gui and I can't see any improvements with PT Gui. Maybe for images with less defined shapes (clouds) there are improvements with PT gui, but not for this image.

Thank you for your compliments