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Picture of the Day

Monday
September 22, 2014
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it's been a hectic september--
had to get ahead on farm work
before going back to the northwest for
my first visit since the move last december,
but that 16-day "vacation" turned into
a marathon of assisting Studio Kabuya
at smoke farm lofi fest, setting up a new
home base household on capitol hill, and
3 excellent but exhausting 4Shadows jams

got back here to maui where there
were figurative fires to put out, much
work to catch up on, plus we had a
houseguest--amber cortes from seattle

other than the jams i didn't do much
creatively--no time for reading, let
alone writing, but i did "discover" my
phone's panorama feature and it's
rekindled my interest in photography

what i like about it:

1)
with the iphone 4s, to shoot a panoramic
photo you move the camera steadily in a
straight line to stitch together a long skinny
image in real time
.
p
anning along a given axis
is a hit or miss process
with often surprising
results,
especially when you try to force glitch the system
by moving too slowly or erratically. for example,
by
tracking a subject through space one achieves a cubist
effect--duchamp's nude descending a staircase
becomes bikini model fleeing into water


2)
the stylized anamorphic look with fisheye bulge
underscores the illusory nature of photography.
panoramic pictures are subjective; they don't pretend
to represent a static objective reality but create a
distorted view approximating the photographer's
perspective with closer objects blown out of proportion.
where single frame photos encapsulate static moments
unambiguously, the fractalized and recursive stuttering
of pano "fails" (whether deliberate or unintended)
remind us that what we assume to be a fixed reality is
really just a fluid pastiche of fragmentary perceptions.

3)
since i'm already late to the panoramic party i might
as well save the most obvious reason for last: panos
better re-create the immersive feel of a given place.
regular photos present a flattened and truncated view,
capture only a small wedge of the 360 degree pie. the
sweeping pano, being bigger (about 10000x4500 pixels)
captures more information and forces the viewer
to scan the image as opposed to "getting it" in one
quick glance. scroll to the bottom of this page and
back again to see what i mean. happy pano'ing!












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