Pano Influences

About a year and a half ago I wrote a blogpost about some panoramic photo techniques that I was starting to play with. At the time, I was just starting to experiment with that approach in landscapes and environmental portraits, but had a sense that something of significance might arise from shooting super wide. I have done a lot of experimentation throughout my career, most of it leading nowhere. Up until mid-autumn this year, I would have considered those panoramic experiments in the "leading nowhere" category, but when I started to review the photos from my four-week trip across the upper Midwest and Rockies from late September 2020, it was immediately apparent that those experiments, in a less than subtle fashion, were all over the landscapes from my travels.

While I had turned away from doing actual panos close to fifteen months ago, those experiments had strongly influenced an unconscious shift away from using normal and short telephoto lenses, to working pretty wide, 28mm and 24mm lenses, when shooting in landscape situations, especially though not always, in vertical situations. My primary ongoing projects over the last decade, the Black Cacti and the Rim Fire have both been photographed using shorter telephoto lenses at high depth of field. I actually was unaware of this shift in my landscape photos, and only realized it when I began to review the photos from my autumn travels . Many of the photos did not easily lend themselves to the square cropping I prefer for my Instagram page. Some photos, in fact, yielded square outcomes that made no informational, graphic or aesthetic sense. In some cases, it was actually impossible to find a square crop that worked at all. See below.

Upon even further review, it became apparent this shift had begun during my previous trip to Utah in June 2019. Utah had had a very rainy winter, and the wildflower blooms were everywhere carpeting desert lowlands for miles. The only way to even begin to emphasize the extent of the blooms was to work with wide angle lenses to show both the extent of the bloom in the foreground, while also giving a sense of the general area. The vertical photo above shows the visual structure of many of these wider vertical photos; the lower section of the photo is somewhat similar to a macro or detail photo, with a landscape dominating the middle ground and background. In some cases, like the parched soil above, the point of view is lower, and the photos are comprised of solely foreground and background. The vertical panos almost have the stacked feeling usually associated with Bill Brandt's figures in interior and exterior space.

While I have used this approach for photographing roadways for over two decades, this is the first time it has become my preferred compositional mode across all types of environmental situations. Accordingly, the question arises, why has this become my preferred approach to landscape over the last year or so? The answer to this question is twofold, and is related to two newer projects I have been working on for the last year and a half; the Tall Saguaros, and the Underscapes.

The Tall Saguaros are a newer desert transect census of complete saguaros in landscape. The goal is to compare the variation in form of older mature cacti. While most of the black cacti transect groups are gridded out as squares, or horizontal rectangles, from the outset this group has been photographed vertically, and cropped in a somewhat panoramic fashion where the cactus is emphasized over the surrounding environment. The grid when the project is completed will be comprised of these narrower vertical crops.

The Underscapes are a series of spatially ambiguous baby-landscapes I have been working on in three different canyons in Utah for the last few years. They are photos of invisible landscapes commonly found throughout the southwest, few people ever notice These three canyons have very deep undercuts created by faulting, flash-floods and sandpaper like winds. The photos hover at the border of macro and landscape photography, where texture and line detail are overemphasized by total sharpness across the whole image. This concern with sharpness and texture has strongly influenced the frontal textural concern in the lower third of many of the vertical panoramic photos.

While I am actually pretty satisfied with the visual language of the vertical panoramic photos, I have really struggled with the horizontals. In most cases, the horizontals feel like wide angle photos cropped tight to remove some sky. When I have attempted to use the visual language of the vertical images in a horizontal setting, the photos have felt cramped and texturally too dense in the foreground. The photo of the blooming tree below in a field of dead grasses may actually be the beginning of a horizontal language, as the visual structure of the photo does not have the traditional use of space found in the rest of the horizontals. Here the compression actually emphasizes the actual shape of the tree. However, this photo is less than a week old, and it takes me a while to decide if something is significant, or just another experiment that has gone nowhere.