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Dusseldorf photo artist Andreas Gursky is a hot
property these days with massive color prints of buildings and
interiors selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I was surprised and stunned to first see the
Gursky-like photos of Max Lyons, a master of panorama and
multi-image assemblage using a freeware program called Panorama
Tools (http://www.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch/)
with digital images from a Nikon CP990.
This inspired me to go running right to the
Panorama Tools website, downloading the software and letting
myself in for the frustration of the 21st century. Panorama
Tools is not nuclear physics but it's bloody close!
Photographing for only three years, Lyons is a
consummate photo craftsman who knows his way around the digital
world. His TawbaWare firm http://tawba.tripod.com distributes a
number of digital camera software products including the
excellent Thumber utility. Moreover, he has an incredible eye
for the unlikely wider angle.
His personal website features galleries
http://users.erols.com/maxlyons/ of Washington, D.C.,
landmarks and wonderful landscapes from southern Utah. Nearly
all of the images are made in Panorama Tools using from two to
as many as nine separate images.
Max is a proficient night shooter and the cover
of darkness is useful to cover up the seams that invariably
occur with multiple image shots. But browsing through his
Washington gallery uncovers incredible interior scenes with
flawless vertical lines associated only with rise/tilt controls
of large format view cameras.
One of the beauties of Panorama Tools is its
feature that allows stacking of photos… not just horizontal
stitching… but vertical stitching as well. Plus, the combined
image can be remapped to various perspectives, eliminating the
curved lines so common to wide angle lenses.
It's obvious from his night shots that Max makes
great use of a tripod, but not always.
His incredible view of the east wing of the
National Gallery was made from four hand-held exposures.
Panorama Tools' perspective remapping came into play here as the
bottom half of the image was made with the camera pointing down,
the top half with the camera pointing up. Plus, the image has an
incredible mix of lighting which required careful exposure
control. Finally, the people and the Calder mobiles were in
constant motion.
Max points out that this was a very difficult
image to stitch because of the amount of detail. He notes that
several of the people in the image appear twice.
Lyons' Sunset in the Valley of the Gods is a
two-image pano which displays incredible color and a full moon
and Venus. He points out that between the two 8-second
exposures, the light had changed considerably and required some
color adjustment to blend the two images.
Max's sense of humor comes through in his
self-portrait with two doppelgangers. His website is filled with
great images and lots of useful information for digital
photographers. The images require considerable disk space with
the nine-image photos running as big as 25mb. Naturally, these
huge images print beautifully in 16x200 and larger sizes, his
biggest being a 20x30 print of Bryce Canyon.
Max has inspired me to retire from the graphic
design racket and go back to school on Panorama Tools, even if I
have to trade in my Mac for a Windows box. As far as
comparisons, Gursky may be getting the big bucks with his
big-camera interiors but he could take some lessons from Lyons.
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