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Monday |
| 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. panning 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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