Canyon de Chelley Panographic




Canyon de Chelley - Click to Enlarge

Here is another panographic photo.  This one was made with 14 individual photos stitched together in Photoshop.  There are enough pixels in this photo to create a print 86 inches wide by 18 inches high.

The image itself was clearly shot at the bottom of the canyon.  Just before we ate lunch, we stopped near the house and Jack asked Oscar if we could get permission to shoot some ruins and rock paintings.  Oscar knows the family and said he would get out and see what he could do to gain access.  I got the general impression the deal needed to be done by people who knew each other and that there was a financial component.  The good news is that we got access.  We had to walk the perimeter of the field to get to the location to shoot the ruin.  We shot the ruin for a while, and when we finished with that, I turned around and surveyed the view, looking back to where we came from.  Impressive.  So I thought about how would I capture the impressive view.  A single photo could capture only a portion of the view.  Even using a wide angle lens would not capture enough of the view to capture the impact, especially since the wider the lens, the more the background gets pushed into the distance.  The answer seemed to be a pano.  So I turned the camera to its portrait position and took enough photos to cover about 220 degrees of view.  When I look at this photo, I do not get the impression that the actual view is so wide.  When the image is flat on the screen, there are no cues that the image follows a huge arc.

The ruins, by the way, are behind me - in the missing 145 degrees of view.

In past years I would have tried to capture the top of the centre canyon outcrop.  I think if I did that the scale of the centre band of trees would be too small and the house would be lost.  I think that the subject would change to the then fully visible centre outcrop - look at the two approx. 45 degree lines leading towards the apex of the centre outcrop - that's where your eye would go.  I wanted this photo to give a grand sense of the natural location in relation to the habitation of man, so the small house centre stage needs to be the focus.

Ruins, Canyon de Chelley - Click to Enlarge

This is the photo of the ruins and rock painting.  Some of the painting is within the last 100 years, while other images are hundreds of years old.  You can see that there has been a restoration - a new window with glass, a door, and some form of recent roof.  We had no details of how it is used today or what is it's history.

This is not a good photo as we were shooting mid day and the foreground is in full sunlight, and the subject is in full shadow - way too much contrast so the ruin gets lost. So not only is it a photo of a ruin, it's a ruin of a photo.