One of the complaints my wife has against me is that I never throw anything away. In that I have to say I am guilty as charged. If I can think of any possible use for an object I will try and squirrel it away somewhere for that future legendary time when "it will be useful".
I'm much the same with photographs. I hate deleting them since I always believe that at some point some magical new technique will turn my otherwise bland, ordinary or simply bad images into world beaters.
In 2018 I set myself a task. I had seen images on a site called panoramastreetline.com in which they had taken a view of a which consisted of a flat panorama of a high street. I had never seen this sort of perspective or linear panorama before and I decided to set creating my own version using my local high street as an example.
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| The high street in question |
I immediately hit issues. Firstly, my high street like so many is plagued by cars parking up and down the street. Pretty well all through the day and evening both sides of the streets will have cars blocking my view.
Secondly the street is narrow, meaning that in order to get the whole building in, including the roofline, I would need either to take images in portrait or have a very wide lens. Taking in portrait would mean I would have to take more shots, a wide angle would mean more distortion. Obviously the normal method is to get a tilt shift lens. However Fuji do not make one and they are expensive and specialist bits of kit
I would also need to keep the camera relatively parallel to the scene and level. This would mean putting it on a tripod. However I was not happy with the idea of standing in a busy high street with a tripod, trying to gets shots between passerby's, nor would the pedestrians be happy with me blocking my path.
However I did have some local knowledge, which I hoped would help. Every year the town holds a may market. the high street is shutdown for stalls to to be put up. To do this, the street is shut off and all cars are removed. I realised that if I get there early, before the stalls arrived, i would have a small window of opportunity to take my photos.
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| Calm before the storm. Setting up for may market |
So I set off, one early bank holiday morning and found the street empty apart from people putting up bunting. I quickly set about my task an took a number of overlapping images down both sides of the street. However I was nervous of not getting the shots in time, so I probably was not as careful setting up the shots as I should be.
When I got the images home, I set about creating my linear panorama. I had assumed that I could just throw it at some panorama creating software and viola. However this failed. Basically all panorama software assume you take the images from a fixed point. They could not handle the parallax distortions caused by moving down the street.
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| The result of auto stiching in panorama software. The results are ...interesting |
I realized that I would have to stitch them together myself. However even here I failed. I just could not get the images to line up/ After a few days I gave up and moved onto other things
A few months ago I was doing one of those youtube tutorials and I realised what I had been missing. I dug out my 2 year old images, and suddenly it started coming together. The process was tedious, but at last after 2 years I got close to the result I was looking for.
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| The final results |
History in the making
Apart from the important point of proving a point to my wife about not throwing anything away, I am pleases I persevered and created these images.
Even in two years, the high street has changed. Small towns like mine are under constant pressure from the online giants and 2020 has been particularly tough. I have no doubt that by the end of the year, there will be changes again.
By creating images that not only show buildings, but also puts them in context, it captures a small snapshot in time of an important part of a community, which future generations will be able to compare.
More information on how it was processed can be found here
