Orbit

Orbit Panograph, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, 2012 © Graham Dew

With the first heavy frosts of winter arriving this week it’s easy to forget that the London Olympics and Paralympics finished only a couple of months ago. For a few glorious weeks, the rain stopped and the country came together to cheer on the athletes of the world and enjoy the spectacle. Every time the Olympics come up in conversation, the abiding memory everyone shares is how good it was; how everything worked and worked well, and how much joy it brought to our country. There has been much said about the legacy of the games, of how the facilities and infrastructure will be of benefit in the future and how British sport has benefitted from the games. I hope one aspect of the legacy is that we will remember that Britain is a great place to live and that we can still achieve great things.

There was a fair amount of scepticism before the Olympics, including the sculpture/edifice/tower that is the Orbit. Designed by Anish Kapoor, this idiosyncratic structure suddenly seemed to fit into the rest of the Olympic landscape once the games were underway. Its twisting nature is easily seen from below but is best appreciated when walking down the spiral staircase when exiting the viewing platform at the top. It’s a fun, slightly ridiculous folly and so I thought I would try to reflect that in the way I photographed it.

Inspired by the energetic panographies of Mareen Fischinger I decided I would create an image made of many overlapping cells. With scarcely any vertical or horizontal lines in the Orbit, it seemed appropriate to turn the camera 45° and use square cells. I should have switched on the gridlines in my camera, because I managed to hold it at about 40° throughout the whole of the sequence of shots. At least I was consistent!

I have used transparency for all of the cells (set at 70%) to give some bleed through of overlapping cells. This means that the image needed to composited in Photoshop as the print module in Lightroom does not allow transparency of images. By pre-processing the cells down to 600 pixels square I managed to keep the overall file size down to realistic levels, but if LOCOG would like to buy a giant version I will be very happy to create a high resolution version…

Leaf Fall

Autumn Leaves, Winchester Cathedral Yard, 2011

We have seen a lot of leaf fall in the past few days in Winchester. Recent strong winds and heavy rain have shaken the foliage down and many trees are now leafless, showing their delicacy and structure once again. It is all rather lovely, and gives us an excuse to get outside and get some exercise clearing away the debris. Many paths in the countryside have a good covering of colourful leaves too. The world is indeed mud luscious and puddle wonderful, and will probably stay that way until spring time.

Making Joiners in Lightroom

In my Mother’s Garden, Autumn 2011

I’ve recently had some unexpected time at home which has given me the opportunity to catch up on a few joiners that I had shot in the past but never found the time to finish off as completed images. Up until this summer I used Photoshop to build my joiners which has worked well enough, but does place rather heavy demands on the computer in terms of disk, RAM & processor performance. But increasingly, I’ve been experimenting with Lightroom, and now have a pretty reliable alternative way of building still movies. This newer method centres around the use of the Print module, which allows me to build and re-edit multi-cell images with very little in the way of computer resources. Lightroom is a parametric, metadata driven editing system unlike most others including Photoshop, which work on pixel by pixel editing. The upshot of this is that the final size of the completed joiner does not have to be considered until the very end of the project. Very high resolution, very large print size images can be prepared as easily as small web based output; they just take a little longer to be processed. 

Crucially, since the arrival of Lightroom 4 I can now save my print layouts and revisit them at any time, unlike in Lightroom 3. There are some weaknesses in the method; I would dearly love to be able to zoom into the display in the print module, and it would be great if I could use the Develop module functionality whilst still displaying the Print module view. But overall, using Lightroom is a much quicker and freer way of constructing joiners than using Photoshop.

Lightroom became my editor of choice about a year ago. Prior to that I was using Photoshop but rarely left Camera Raw when editing my pictures, so the transition to Lightroom was fairly easy and obvious.

The picture above is made up of photos taken a year ago on my LX3 compact. I wish I had found time to put it together sooner as I’m quite pleased with the result. The individual cells were taken with the lens set at a focal length equivalent to 60mm in 35mm film terms.  If I were to reshoot in the future I would probably use the G3/Olympus 45 combination which would give small cell sizes, but I think the picture holds together well with only four cells height. It reminds me that pictures can be made whatever the weather; blue skies and bright sunshine are not a pre-requisite for a a successful image.

In my Mother’s Garden, as Seen Through the Bathroom Window, Autumn 2011