Remember To Think About Things You Don't Think About

Good ideas often come to me at home, as opposed to out in the field. Does that ever happen to you, or is it just me?

For example, ideas like ‘I should try to make some creative multiple exposures’ or ‘I should force myself to just shoot with a wide angle’ (since my natural tendency is to go telephoto), or ‘I should try my hand at some panoramas’. That last one, the panoramas, I tell myself all the time. But it’s always when I’m at home. For heaven’s sake, I even have a small pano head for my tripod. But when I’m out there in the fireld it seems like I just never think about the things that I don’t usually do. It’s not an unwillingness to try them out, but, rather, just that they don’t come to mind when I’m actively photographing. It’s often afterwards, when I am looking at images in Lightroom, that I say ‘you know, it might have been a good idea to have tried x, y , or z”. Then it’s too late.

On my recent trip to Oregon I was at Sunset Bay making photographs and admiring the expanse of beach. I was trying to get close to the water in the foreground and shoot wide to take in the scene with the cliffs on either side, but I just couldn’t get wide enough. I even got my cell phone out and made a short hand held video of the location, panning from the cliffs on one side to the cliffs on the other side. You would think that by then the thought of making a pano would have crossed my mind, but it hadn’t yet. After another twenty minutes or so of photographing it finally struck me…….’I keep telling myself that I should try my hand at some panos and this would be a great site to try it out’. Duh, right, lets give it a shot.

I assembled the 10 image stitch in Lightroom (there was a good deal of overlap in each image) which did a very nice job. Because the 10 separate images were, by necessity, taken at slightly different moments in time, there was a bit of a funky look to some of the waves (surprisingly few though) as they were in one position in one image but moved before the next shot was taken. However, it wasn’t too difficult to fix things up in Photoshop (now don’t go looking for the spots, as I fixed them pretty well). When it came to the cliffs and sandy beach I couldn’t detect a stitch seam anywhere.

By the way, here is that 15 second hand held cell phone video I made before figuring out that I needed to make a still image panorama. As you can tell, there was a good deal of wind.

By the way, if you happen to subscribe to the blog by email, the video won’t come along with the email. You’ll have to go to the blog itself if you’d like to see the video. Not sure why, but apparently that’s the way it works!

Moral of the story for me? It’s a good idea to stop and think every so often instead of doing things as I have always done. That’s probably a good idea in general, not just for photography. I need to remember to think about the things I don’t usually think about!

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