NEW YORK PHOTO BLOG / DAVE BECKERMAN

I’ve started to add the panos which I now call composites to the store.  They’re not in panoramic form of 2 x 1, and people just don’t consider them panos, so I came up with Composites.

Anyway, that’s not why I started to write this post.  I just wanted to give you an example of the degree of detail available and the size of some of these things.  This is not even a particularly large one.  So first here’s the shot you see on the web, which I’m calling A Hazy Shade of Winter.

Think about it.  Shot with a 50mm lens.  Huge. And every bit of it is in perfect focus.

And here’s what a 100% piece looks like with the Lightroom Info.  Remember – this is without any interpolation.

I may have made a mistake in calling all these images that have been stitched together with Giga Pano software – panoramics or panos.  At least that is the idea that several people have written to me about.  It’s true that many of the images I’ve been doing are composed of from 6 to 60 separate shots – but they aren’t usually in the Panoramic Aspect which I suppose is about length 2 by height 1 or the other way around.

The early attempts were more or less class panoramics – long to short ratios with wide angle lenses (mostly) and maybe showing 180 or 360 degrees of a scene.  There’s no doubt those are recognized as panos.  But what happens when you take that pano that was originally composed of 60 images and you project it using the planar projection so that lines in the middle are rather straight – and you crop off the edges where the planar projection tends to get blurry.  Is it still a pano if it’s now in a 4 x 5 ratio.

It seems as if you could call it a montage – but that’s really film talk.  And a collage – it’s not that.  Anyway – calling them panos has confused a bunch of people who say, “Where’s the pano – I don’t see it.”

And then you have this shot which is on the line… 12 images with a 20mm lens… and not cropped.  It’s not the aspect ratio of a pano, but the effect of viewing 180 degrees without much distortion is a possibility with pano.  So just chime in if you have an idea.

Central Park South – Storm

This is only three images.  It’s what I got before the police told me to get a pass to shoot in Grand Central, and before I found out that the man with authority to give out the pass wouldn’t be in ’til 9 a.m.  But the whole emptiness of the place, plus the night through the windows… click the image – it’s worth it.

A few nights ago, on an assignment I managed to get this panorama (16 shots) of Columbus Circle just as it was about to pour down.  That’s probably one of my favorite atmospherics – not the shot during the rain – but as the clouds are going gray and you feel the pressure dropping suddenly.

Shot with 20mm / 16 shots /  full size @ 300 dpi would be about 45 x 60 inches

I haven’t reached the point of putting any of the panos up for sale, but I imagine they’ll have their own gallery, and there will be an entirely different choice of sizes.  A shot like this, for example, you should be able to purchase from 16 x 20 to something giga like 45 x 60 or greater.  These are non-interpolated sizes – and with just a 2x interpolation you are in the 10 foot long arena.