Panorama | Family & Friends | Events |
Before I began my focus creating panoramas I created photo collages. This started in my final year studying photography at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design, back in 1990. I would make two contact sheet from the photo shoot. One would go with the negatives the other one I cut up into individual frames. Here are a few examples of some of the first collages I made.
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Some family and friends engaged in role playing game in my parents basement. |
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Students doing their drawing homework. |
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Someone getting a haircut at a local salon. |
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Friend playing in a bar. |
My interest in creating photo collages was mostly inspired by the works of David Hockney. His photo collage work is best know for the image of pearblossom-highway, Hockney shoot more than 60 rolls of film over 9 days. The final collage used more than 1000, 4X6 prints, less than half of what was taken. He was not concerned about the quality of the prints, he is foremost a painter and not a photographer, the camera was just a tool. He used 110 film camera, but one of the best there was, a Pentax SLR that actually held the film flat and used a glass lens. He had the prints developed at a corner drugstore and used the varyings colors that bad 1 hours labs unavoidably create to his advantage to look like paint strokes. |
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But my favorite are the ones with people over a short period of time showing motion or action, like The Skater |
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I always thought as a photographer first. The quality of the individual prints were important. Exposers were locked when taking the pictures and when creating the prints. For aesthetic reasons, duplicate prints were never made to be put into a collage. I Never used more than one of each picture, but I never forced myself to use all of them either.
After evaluating the many miniature collages I selected four to create larger projects from. I enlarged each of the selected images and printed them full frame onto 8X10 paper giving about 6 3/4 X 10 inch prints. I arranged and glued the enlargements onto 4 X 6 foot boards.
The progression from collage to panoramas continued over the next couple of years. Although I took many outdoor cylinder panorama these are the more interesting ones from the time.
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This picture shows some of the tall buildings in down town Calgary. My next step was to hand print the pictures and increase the perspective of looking up at the buildings, by tilting the paper while exposing the image onto it. I later found this was not possible because the lab cut through every third negative. |
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Someday soon I will scan the negatives of the balloons and create a digital photo collage of it. |
It was not until after Jan 1995 when Apple released Quick Time VR software, that software for creating panoramas and viewing them on a computer became available. Other companies quickly started to create their own software.
By 1997 I was stitching photos together on the computer. The first thing I did was go back through some of my negatives from when I was cutting and sticking photos together and made these panoramas of the Family of Man from that time.
David Hockney on Artsy
Jeremy Wolff collages
Page last modified Dec 27, 2014 |