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Our perceptions normally encompass a viewing angle of roughly 90 degrees; anything wider has to rely on short-term memory. What happens when we’re presented with a panoramic view? Our wonderful brain adapts, and we transcend our biological limits. Concepts like left, right, front, and back no longer are valid. The viewer becomes like Panoptes, suddenly able to see everything at once. My interest in creating panoramic views began many years ago because of my fascination with super-wide angles lenses. While I always wanted to see as much as possible in my photos, I was never satisfied with the result because of the lack of detail or the dated distortions produced by fisheye lenses. |
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Joergen Geerds
Joergen Geerds, Central Park: The Pond, 2008. 360ð panorama, digital C-print, 96 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Our perceptions normally encompass a viewing angle of roughly 90 degrees; anything wider has to rely on short-term memory. What happens when we’re presented with a panoramic view? Our wonderful brain adapts, and we transcend our biological limits. Concepts like left, right, front, and back no longer are valid. The viewer becomes like Panoptes, suddenly able to see everything at once.
My interest in creating panoramic views began many years ago because of my fascination with super-wide angles lenses. While I always wanted to see as much as possible in my photos, I was never satisfied with the result because of the lack of detail or the dated distortions produced by fisheye lenses. So I started researching different photographic methods, from old-school swivel-lens cameras to the use of medium format fisheyes. Then digital camera technology caught up with my imagination, and I found a technique that allowed me to be flexible with the view angles and still get satisfactory resolution using a DSLR on a hand-modified panorama head. This technique is well established but mostly used forvirtual-reality applications like apartment views on real-estate sites.
The VR application never appealed to me, because it represented a cropped view of the world, a view I wanted to avoid. But the same technique allowed me to render a single, flat view that was most suitable for printing, as it had no restrictions in terms of output size. Many photographers use this technique to create immense and beautiful landscapes. Eric Hanson and Greg Downing from xRez.com, for example, are working on a super-large panorama of the Yosemite National Park Valley, with a projected size of 100 by 8 feet.
While the grandeur of the West has much appeal, I am more attracted to urban settings, especially New York at night with its multiple, ever-shifting light sources. The city is familiar, yet always changes, and has as many breathtaking views as viewers. The possibilities seem, and are indeed, endless. That’s the very essence of New York. The viewer gets hyper-wide vistas that are both grand and intimate, capturing details of pedestrians under a nearby street lamp as well as a poignant TV screen, seen through a window, a half a mile away.
Over the last three years I’ve been able to dedicate more of my time to this project, the title of which reflects its content: Luminous New York. Like all artists, I learn from each attempt, each mistake, each sudden cloudburst or snowstorm, each location that turns out to be not as interesting as I thought it would be. Along with my successes I’m willing to share my failures with those who are interested.
