From The Wedding Of A Multi-POW Winner

This is a multi-panel picture of the wedding piper at a multi-POW winner's Sydney wedding, jamming with the (excellent - they could play anything, well) band.

My aim was to try something pictorially dramatic (supplied by the tent and the lighting) that included lots of people doing lots of things in it. In short a "people panoramic".

The main problem with this pic was that the piper wasn't centered, and this shot screamed for a central figure.

I took the panel with the piper in it first and then 11 more to complete the 360 rotation.

How to frame the picture the way I wanted? It was slightly off level (-0.2 degrees approximately) and taken in all the wrong sequence.

First, I should say the shot was actually about 380 degrees, so there were repetitive features at both left and right.

To get the piper roughly centered, I made his panel image #6 out of 12. Then came the fine tuning.

For a reference point, I picked a rivet in the hardwood plank flooring at the extreme left of the pic. Its main feature was that it was distinct while remaining extremely small. I then drew a Photoshop guide down to exactly bisect this tiny feature. I then panned across to to the right hand side of the stitch and found the same rivet, about a hundred pixels below the guide line. The aim was to rotate the picture so that both versions of the same rivet were on the same horizontal guide line.

After SELECT/ALL and the EDIT/TRANSFORM/ROTATE, I was able to move the centre point of the picture (displayed as a cross within a circle in this function of Photoshop, but not shown here) so that it exactly superimposed on top of the rivet pixels at left. This then became the "centre of rotation". By a process of trial and error I rotated the picture until the right-hand rivet lined up with the guide line. This meant I had the picture exactly level, to within a pixel or two.

Next came the cropping.... drawing a vertical guide through both (now level) versions of the rivet, I was then able to generate a rectangular marquee at these points and - after lining the marquee up vertically as well - I cropped the image.

I now had a level image of exactly 360 degrees.

After that I was able to use (what I had always thought was) a really dopey Photoshop function, FILTERS/OTHER/OFFSET to "slide" the picture left and right (with preview) until I got the precise framing I wanted. There was an ever-so-slight demarcation line on either side of the rivet pixels, so I just cleaned this up with the CLONE stamp. OFFSET is a a "really dopey" function no longer. It was perfect for my purposes.

An interesting philosophical problem is stated as follows: is stitching the picture together in a different sequence to the original capture sequence an "image manipulation"?

I don't think so, as one of the luxuries of taking 360 rotational pictures is that your starting point is totally up to you to decide as a post-production chore. Hence I've checked the "unmanipulated" box in the technical info. The original direction in which the camera was pointing (i.e. the identity of the first panel photographed) is immaterial when you have 360 degrees to use.

Discuss.

Cheers all,

P.S. The original of this picture is 3300 pixels high by 19,000 pixels wide, about 65 x 11 inches at 300 dpi. It has been "cleaned up" with Neat Image to get rid of digital noise.

Surprisingly, the exposure was no problem at all. I say "surprisingly" because with film, exposure would have been my greatest concern. With the digital I just made two test exposures and then banged away.

Lovely!

P.P.S. The absolute rightmost figure (in the distance in the white wedding dress) is the bride.

Gorgeous!

Tony, it sure is a lot more interesting than most wedding photos.

Are you confessing that in a moment of weakness you tied the knot?

No, it wasn't my wedding. Sydney has its fair share of "multi-POW award winners" and I was along to take some of the pictures that my colleague couldn't take himself (for obvious reasons, though he did try!), and to have a good time too, of course. I would have done without the tent, the tables, the rented municipal baths and the 80 guests. City Hall and a curry afterwards is my style.

Call me a romantic fool.

I'm usually very cynical about these occasions, but in this case everything was just "right". Guests mingled, danced, went off by themselves for some quiet times, sat in the light, sat in the darkness, walked around the pool and chatted, and generally had a very relaxed time. The atmosphere was unstressed and the happy couple were charming. Formalities were kept to a minimum, and speeches too.

The band was excellent. They were real pros and (as I wrote above) could play anything. Yet, despite the professionalism, they had a lot of obvious fun and kept in synch with the guests' mood. When 10pm came the amplifiers had to be turned off (local government regulations). No problems! They went acoustic and played some of the best music of the night for another hour, right from the middle of the floor with the guests all around them, troubadour-style. Extremely impressive.

I forgot to mention the food: excellent, delicious in small servings and lots of them (no formal sit-down dinner). A complete cut-above your normal run of "finger food": not a "Thai Chicken Wings" in sight. The "Teriyaki Prawns" were particularly scrumptious.

The pool is a harbour pool, subject to tides. It is where Dawn Fraser (a multi gold medal winner at three Olympic games) learned to swim and later on learned to win gold medals. It was built in 1894 and renovated recently (about 10 years ago). There's a reasonable external shot here , taken around 6:00pm. Later on in the evening fishes from the Harbour came in for feeding. We could see them swimming everywhere, some quite big, against the sandy bottom. The night caretaker broke up a loaf of stale bread and threw it to them. It was gone in a frenzy inside two minutes. There's something satisfying about "wild" sealife coming into the light for a brief dinner before returning back to the darkness. This is the same harbour that Finding Nemo was all about, in case anyone didn't know. I do know because I've seen the film eleven-hundred times with the grandkids.

I would find it difficult to imagine a better night. Congrats to everyone involved.

There were cooings from my own partner and "marriage noises" made which I came down upon heavily straightaway, so as not to give her any encouragement at all. We love each other. That's enough for me, and it'd better bloody-well be enough for her (just kidding).

Thanks for the extended reply, Tony. This is interesting to look at in the context of everything that you have said.

The bride is usually central to wedding shots. It's interesting how you've stuck her off in the distance, and to one side.

In this panorama, as with the other with the pool, there is a lot going on, which I think is appropriate to a panorama, which is, after all, a slice of reality, not a single subject to build a composition around. In spite of that fact, there does seem to be something that holds this photo together, and it just might be that incredible roof--and with a "peak" right over the band.