Panoramas

Chatting to an artist in the Light in Leeds one afternoon, who was exhibiting photographic prints of buildings, he told me his philosophy was to reveal the views to people that they normally cannot see. The prints were panoramas of elevations with dramatic skies and lighting. Position, narrow streets and obstructions prevented this complete view to be obtained normally.

It seemed a perfect technique to try and portray the exterior of Dalton Mills. The philosophy was to not overlook the obvious and capture these impressive buildings in their full exterior glory.
I photographed the facades head-on, moving along a several feet at a time to capture a series of photographs that could be stitched together in photoshop to give a photographic elevation of each building. This was unsuccessful, With so many windows in close rows, it was impossible to get a consistently elevational view without photographing each column of windows individually. You will always get a perspective view of the adjacent ones and too much manipulation destroys the integrity of the image.

It was whilst photographing New Mill’s south façade that I took a quick series of images with a small Nikon compact digital camera using ‘scene’ mode shows a transparent edge to your photograph to align it with the next one to form the scene. I quickly stitched together the Nikon scene and the image conveyed everything I had hoped for, a more realistic portrayal much closer to a natural view.

The result is much more consistent with the style of the project and answers the brief of ‘capturing the building in its current state’ with a simple and effective approach.