Photoshop Creative Magazine (Jan 2007)
→ for archival’s sake
Article about Panography in this magazine from Great Britain.
Panography… taking panorama to its limits!
Text by Zoe Mutter
There’s an innovative artistic technique that has recently caught our eye called ‘Panography’. Panographic shots are wide-angle hand-made pictures containing dozens of photos of a scene that when joined together, from a larger picture. This lets you capture an extensive landscape more easily.
This technique was discovered by Mareen Fischinger when she was looking for a different approach to capturing reality. »Since my Canon software did not support the Interval Shooting mode on my Mac, I started crazily clicking my Window view while moving around my camera as a test, while figuring out if the settings or zoom need to be fixed for the best results,« said Mareen. »I did not finde an acceptable auto-stitching tool and started overlaying the pictures as half transparent, so I could see the overlapping edges. I liked the look when I was done arranging, and never went back to hundert percent visibility of the layers.« When creating the effect, the single images aren’t skewed or rescaled or cropped. Instead, they are overlaid over a white base colour, so it’s important that the images all have similar contrast and colour values to help you match them up.
The first real panograph was taken when Mareen was walking to Düsseldorf’s most photographed place, a bridge on Königsallee. »People must have thought I was out of my mind, taking about 300 pictures within five minutes,« said Mareen. The technique went on to produce so much interest that she has created its own community on the Flickr website. Talking about the naming of the group and technique, Mareen said: »I simply called it panography, because it isn’t quite a panorama, but it makes up something like a new photograph, seen out of many angles.«
At the moment the group has 87 members and nearly 200 panographic images. Some members of the group have likened the style and method used to David Hockney’s work and overlaid Polaroid images.
