My primary photographic art form is Panoramas. I have a passion for Panoramas.
The Big Picture:
I desire to gift the Future with a catalog of long images. I want this gift to be user friendly, useful, artful, and of long term value.
Subject Matter:
It's all fair game with me, however in the year 2010 I am going to focus on "Humans at Labor".
I don't think that we document our everyday lives very well. I know that as I look at older photographs I love to see "how it used to be". By spending the year 2010 trying to document "Humans at Labor" I should end up with images that will be very interesting in 10+ years.
My Thoughts about Photography:
Most often when I photograph I am thinking of the future. Will this image have value in the future? And by value I don't necessarily mean monetary value. By value I mean "will this image help to understand the past? Will this image help humanity move into the future? I have decided to become more focused in this effort. The year 2010 will be focused on "Humans at Labor". I'm looking forward to photographing humans at work...humans creating things, building things, repairing things
Size:
I restrict myself to creating either horizontal or vertical panoramas that are 10" X 32", 300ppi. This is almost a 30 megapixel image...lots of pixels...lots of detail...and there are still lots of images available to fit this size. By limiting myself to one ratio (1 : 3.2) I am able to more finely tune my vision.
Paper and Ink:
The Fine Art panoramas that I print personally are printed onto matte archival paper with archival inks. I am led to believe by the paper and ink manufacturers that these prints should easily last 75+ years when displayed properly. I'll never know. I do my best to offer permanence.
Geotagging:
Geotagging is emerging as a technique that should be applied to images of importance. This is sort of complicated. For example:
- Do you record the position of the camera, or of the scene? This is a really important question...and one that has kept me from ordering GPS hardware for my camera. I am finding as I manually geotag that I am geotagging the location of the scene...not of the camera.
- Do you record the altitude?
- Do you record the "compass rose", the direction that the camera was pointing?
- Do you do this automatically? Do you have the camera apply the geotag?
- Of course you record date and time.
Workflow and Archives:
I am a Nikon guy, shooting with a Nikon DSLR (D70) at this time. I'm fortunate that my camera can utilize my old 'film' lenses...because my most favorite lens is a great big heavy 50-300mm press box lens. I love this lens. It reaches out far (to 450mm on my D70), and is very sharp at F11. I of course utilize a tripod when I use this big lens. It should be noted that I always try to use a tripod, regardless of the lens. One of the reasons is that I am allowed the time (the tripod setup time) to study my scene. My tripod forces me to slow down.
Photoshop of course. PTGui is my stitcher (a great piece of software). I print my Fine Art panoramas onto matte paper from QImage. Those of you purchasing from my on-line gallery will be choosing your paper (or metal) when you order. Your fulfillment will be by Bay Photo in Santa Cruz.
My digital images are stored by yyyymmdd. I have carelessly over-written about 2,000 of my earlier digital images...resulting in a permanent loss of the images. My images are currently backed up to both internal and portable hard drives.
I accumulate images are the rate of about 20,000/annually. Most of my images are shot at high resolution, lowest compression, and are output from the camera as .jpg. Occasionally I shoot RAW.
I taught digital imaging at a community college for 10 years. About two years into this stretch I started telling my students that in 1,000 years they are going to look back on us and say "They are the ones that lost all the images!"
I try to not be one of those that loses images...however I admit that I am not converting my film/slide images. I do have them carefully stored...with the intention of converting the images to digital 'one of these days'.
Image Labeling:
I choose to print labels on all of my panoramas stating the title, the place the image was captured, and the date. When I sign an image I also 'time stamp' my signature in the yyyymmdd-hhmm format. I have looked at too many photographs that do not contain this vital information. In this day and age with digital workflows it is very easy to properly label an image. I also label the panoramas electronically with at least Title, Description, and Copyright information.
Your Right to Use My Images:
You have no right to use any of my images in any form without my written permission. Even if you have purchased a print you have no right to reproduce the print without my written permission. I'm not hard to get along with. Contact me. If you are a commercial enterprise expect me to charge you for image use.
