What am I looking at?

These days, nearly all of my photography consists of spherical panoramas.  These are created from a multitude of individual photographs, painstakingly aligned to create an image comprising the entire 360° x 180° field of view.  For the most part, the photographs are all taken consecutively and from the same location. This technique sidesteps the technical limitations of lenses, while having the added benefit of increasing the resolution of the final image.

Now, consider that a sphere is a three dimensional shape.  In order to put a spherical panorama onto a two dimensional surface, some part of the image has to be distorted.  This process is known as projection.  The same process is used in cartography: mapping the globe in two dimensions.  There are many different methods for projecting images, and they run the gamut from mundane to the truly wild.

Beyond the projection and composition, my daytime images are nearly all captured using a process called HDR.  This stands for ‘high dynamic range’, and is another sidestep to technological limitations.  Digital camera sensors can record only a limited range of brightness. This dynamic range can be measured and varies somewhat camera to camera.  However, by taking multiple separate photographs with differing exposure lengths, I am able to extend the dynamic range of the final image.  This helps retain detail and color even in the darkest shadows and brightest highlights.

At night, when HDR is impossible (or prohibitively time consuming and not particularly helpful) I use other techniques and equipment.  Long exposure times are used to capture more light during each photograph. For astrophotography, the limit to this is the movement of the stars.  To circumvent this, I will occasionally use a star tracker which rotates with the stars and to which the camera is mounted.  This allows the use of longer exposure times without visible star trails.  For foreground shots, where nothing moves, individual exposure times can be 30 seconds to several minutes long.  I spend these minutes laying in the dark, stargazing and listening to the sounds of the night.

All of these techniques combine to create a somewhat technical style of photography.  Many of my images consist of several hundred separate photographs. Creating a final image is an arduous process that can take dozens of hours to complete, using multiple programs with many intermediary steps.  While not quite as glamorous as taking the photos in the field, this step is vital to the creation of my style of photography.

I am not a photojournalist, but I am a realist.  While my images are not a freeze-frame of a single moment in time, they are an accurate representation of the scene.  The process of capturing a spherical panorama, especially at night using long exposures, can take up to an hour. Things change: the stars spin, the grass blows around, I walk in circles around the tripod… but what I capture from that scene is what was really there over the course of shooting.  Aside from the projections, which can be pretty fun, I generally don’t ‘manipulate’ my images. I do not radically alter colors or swap in skies that don’t belong. I do remove small imperfections from the image such as dust specs, candy bar wrappers callously left on the ground, and other minor details.  As with traditional photography, I use tools like dodging and burning to accentuate parts of the image and shape my artistic vision.