I have been interested in photography since my childhood. My mother was familiar with cameras and had worked for Polaroid in their optics department in the early ’40’s. I was given a camera at about age 9 and have never stopped taking pictures. The first camera took the “620” size film, and produced little square contact prints of 2.5 x 2.5 inches. At age 15, I bought a second hand 35 mm camera for about $20.00 and used that for many years. Later came a single lens reflex, and then another more elaborate SLR with lots of automatic features. About 2 years ago, I acquired my first digital camera.
Early on I became interested in panoramic pictures, and also in developing and printing my own pictures. My parents helped me set up a darkroom in our house and I learned to develop the film and print black + white pictures. I started carefully cutting the prints so as to create panoramic pictures, but the splices were very apparent even in the best ones.
In the past few years, with the advent of computers and scanners, I was able to scan color negatives to produce digital files, and with the aid of the computer, manipulate those images into seamless panoramas. The technique involves taking a series of pictures and splicing them together so that the final picture is a merging of the individual images into one larger image.
The Panoramas: These are typically 3 to 6 images that were taken either using a traditional film camera, or a digital camera. You will not be able to see the seams! My goal has been to try to faithfully recreate the original scene on paper.
The Single Images: These are various pictures I have taken over the past few years. Some were taken using a film camera, and some were taken with my digital camera. All have been processed using the computer.
My Equipment:
Cameras: Canon EOS Rebel II S (film); Sony DSC-F707 (digital).
Computer and Software: Power Macintosh G3 and Adobe Photoshop 5.5