Project 4- Collage

A more interesting way of producing a panorama is to add together a series of individual photos using the Photomerge software found in all versions of Photoshop or photo editing software available today. This is a process that i have ever used extensively so I'm very interested in what i can produce with it.


With my first attempt i wasn't overly pleased with the results as when the images were put together by the software i have, it didn't produce a long panoramic view i expected but a kind of staggered step of images that clearly had been put together. On reflection i realised that when I'd taken the three images I'd stood still and just moved the camera from left to right as instructed meaning that I'd lost parts of the ground and sky meaning it was always going to turn out like this.( I've since discovered that the new version of Photoshop can fix's this problem simple by selecting the area and pressing delete, shame i haven't got a spare couple of 100.)

With my next attempt i remembered to move myself instead of just the camera and got the results i was looking for. Love the way in this shot your eye is drawn through the gate towards the village in the valley below. It was one of them days when the light was perfect and everything i shot seemed to come out right (could do with everyday being like that but it never happens like that).

For my final try i decided to produce a college using a higher number of images to see how this worked. I used about 5 or 6 frames to produce the shot above but what i found is i didn't like the results as much as say my second attempt. I taken the images landscape (on reflection if i use this many frames again shooting portrait would probably have been a better because it would create a more natural sized landscape image) and when they'd been stitched together i ended up with a very long thin image, yes it included all the view but an area around the church hadn't gone together very well while the entrance to the harbour is distorted by the software to make it match up correctly. Don't really know if this happened because I've tried to fit to much into one image or whether i just didn't take the shots with enough overlap for them to go together well.

Found this process very interesting and feel that i could use some more practice (planning to climb Mount Snowdon this year so should get plenty of chance then) also maybe a little more reading on the subject wouldn't hurt.

Saw a very interesting documentary about David Hockney the other day about how he used collages to produce some incredible work. What he did was to using a Polaroid camera and take large numbers of individual shots of small parts of a scene ( sometime completely out of proportion with each other) then by putting them back to together he'd end up with very abstract work that actual didn't look that strange to the eye. (maybe i didn't explain what he did that clearly but if you google him you'll get the idea) Would love to have ago at something similar one day.