Important! The next meeting of the Flatirons Photo Club will be at Mike’s Camera!
On Tuesday, February 14, 2019, at 7 p.m., Glenn Randall will present Take a Walk on the Wide Side, a lecture on how to compose, shoot, and stitch together single and multi-row panoramas.
The Special Topic for the member competition is Black & White. See https://flatironsphotoclub.org/monthly-members-competition for image submission details. Members are asked to submit images by Sunday evening, February 10.
It’s a wide, wide world out there. Certain subjects just cry out to be photographed in a panoramic format. Many of Glenn’s favorite images from his Sunrise from the Summit project, in which he photographed sunrise (or sunset) from the summit of all 54 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks, proved to be panoramas. Something about that ultra-wide angle of view, sometimes as much as a full 360 degrees, captured the exhilarating, humbling, and awe-inspiring experience of being a tiny speck on top of the world.
The easiest way to shoot a panorama is to take a single frame and crop it to whatever aspect ratio works best for the subject. There’s no law that says that an image composed within a 3:2 frame must be shown with that same aspect ratio. Cropping has two disadvantages, however. The first is that you are limited in angle of view horizontally to the angle of view of your widest lens. The second disadvantage concerns print size. Panoramas look good printed big, but the biggest print you can make is limited by the resolution of a single frame.
The solution is to shoot a series of images, rotating the camera between shots so each frame overlaps the next, then stitch all the frames together in software. With this approach, it’s possible to create enormous panoramas—as much as 360 degrees wide—with great quality. Learning to shoot and stitch panoramas from multiple frames will open up a new world of photographic possibilities. No longer will you be limited to seeing the world through the rectangular frame defined by your viewfinder, with its rigid 2:3 aspect ratio. That view, as pleasing as it may be, is only the starting point in your search for the most evocative possible composition. Take a walk on the wide side, and you’ll never again be content to see the world in just one way.
Artist Biography
Since 1979, Glenn Randall has combined his love of wilderness with a passion for photography. His intimate knowledge of atmospheric optics, weather, and the landscapes he photographs allows him to find the intersections of magical light and stunning subject matter that produce exceptional images. His work has been published in Audubon, Avalanche, Barnes & Noble, Brown Trout, Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy, and Runner’s World calendars and in Audubon, GEO, Outside, SKI, Los Angeles Times Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, New York Times Magazine, and many others. Glenn is a contributing editor at Outdoor Photographer. Prints of his fine-art landscape photographs can be found online at www.glennrandall.com and in Art Mart, on the Pearl St. Mall in Boulder, Colorado. His photographs have also been used by many book publishers and corporate clients. At age 61, he has accumulated over 1,800 photo credits, including 83 covers, and sold over 10,000 prints. He was the sole photographer for three books of landscape photographs, Rocky Mountain National Park Impressions, Colorado Wild & Beautiful, and Sunrise from the Summit: First Light on Colorado’s Fourteeners. Rocky Nook published his how-to books, The Art, Science, and Craft of Great Landscape Photography and Dusk to Dawn: A Guide to Landscape Photography at Night.