Married on the edge of the world: Why I turned 15 photos into 1 single image - Original Work

I've been working on finishing up the editing of these photos today and came across this image that I really love. Well, actually this is 15 images. I'll explain the how and the why under the photo.

Chris and Ann hired us to photograph their wedding a few weeks ago, it was a super short notice job but one that I was pretty excited about. They hired two helicopters to fly us up to a remote mountain top here in British Columbia, where they had a brief but lovely ceremony, then we did an awesome little photoshoot since we were in such an epic and rarely visited location. While we were up there I took this series of shots in the hopes that I could get a good single image put together later on.

I took 15 portrait oriented images, did initial color and toning edits in Adobe Lightroom, then used Photoshop to do the photomerge (usually known as a stitch) resulting in a much larger final image. You might be asking yourself "Why take 15 images and stitch them together? Why not just take a wider shot, or use a wide angle lens?" There are several very good answers to this question, the first being field of view.

Field of View, or FOV

Field of view is the actual image area that you take a photo with. This stitched image has a certain field of view, a certain "area" to it. As a reference, here is one of the individual images I used to create the final product.

A very striking difference no? By taking those 15 images (really closer to 14 after cropping) and putting them together you can make an image with a 35mm digital sensor look like it was taken on medium format. Pretty cool to get that classic look, and feel.

Getting the best of both worlds

So the next question is, if you want to expand field of view, why not just use a wider lens? There are a few answers to this question as well. First of all, if you look at the stitched image, you will notice that despite it's very large field of view, it has close to zero distortion (distortion is when you get that "fishbowl" effect at the edge of an image when using a wide angle lens) This happens because wide angle lenses actually physically bend the light, they curve it inwards to get that wide field of view. Longer (zoomed) lenses don't need to bend the light in because they cover a smaller field of view in relation to your imaging surface (the digital sensor, or what used to be film) This in itself is an awesome plus, but along with the lack of distortion comes having a unique perspective. Not perspective as in human perspective, but the actual physical perspective of image and lens mechanics. Basically the way the photo looks.

With a wide angle lens, you could achieve a similar field of view, but the mountains in the background would be tiny, they would be a much smaller element of the photo, and it would change the feel a lot. Notice in the photo below how the couple looks like they are almost the same height at the mountains in the background? A different look, not worse or better, but you just can't get the same field of view and compression with a single shot from a wide angle lens.

Compression, is the zoom in effect or the "telescoping" effect that lenses have. You see, when you use a wide angle lens, it has a certain amount of "zoom in" if you will, but when you use a telephoto lens it "zooms in" much more. When you zoom in, everything, even the background zooms in. So things in the background, like mountains, look bigger and more prominent. As you can see in the single shot, the mountains become a prominent part of the image because of the lens's compression, but I lose the field of view because of it's focal length (zoom) To get the best of both worlds, I can either use a super expensive digital medium format camera (which I don't have and cant afford), use an old film medium format camera (which I do have but didn't bring), or I can take a bunch of photos and stitch them together with my DSLR.

Bonus

One of the really cool added benefits, and in fact one of the main reasons many photographers will create images like these, is to amplify depth of field (commonly known as DOF) Depth of field is the term that is used to describe how narrow the area of focus in a photo is. You've probably seen many photos that have a very sharp focus on one certain point, but background and even maybe the foreground are very "blurred out". This is created by depth of field, and it can be utilized as a creative tool to make your images more interesting. By doing a photomerge like this one, taken at an already shallow depth of field (in this case the individual images were shot at f1.4 with an 85mm lens) you can amplify the depth of field effect. You can recognize this effect much more in photos where there is a very busy foreground, and where DOF is increased by closer focusing, such as this example taken in a forest in Northern California:

The reason this is a good thing is because it can give an image a very compelling look, and can force the viewer to see the image the way you intended. Naturally we are going to look to the part of the image that is in focus, so if you have only a small part of the image intentionally in focus, it is going to draw the eyes to that point. By having this very shallow depth of field and wide field of view it also mimics iconic images of the past that we all subconsciously recognize, many of which were taken on medium or even large format cameras. This can give your images a classic feel, and many people resonate with that in the ever quickening pace of life that modern technology offers. Besides all that it's a cool thing to experiment with, and can give your images a really unique look. If you want to stand out from the crowd, don't try to be better, be different.

Well I hope you enjoyed the photos and my breakdown of why I take the time to do these types of stitches. If you have any questions feel free to ask me in the comments, and as always if you like the post go ahead and toss me one of those awesome awesome up votes, you know I always appreciate them! Be sure to follow me @dexter-k on Steemit to see new original content all the time.

Thanks for reading!

Dexter