Creative paths
Make the most out of all your tools and learn that you can shoot anything with persistence and Photoshop
Michael Freeman tells you why freeing your format will open up a whole new world of photographic opportunities
Format is the shape of the frame that you shoot. The shape depends on the camera: DSLRS typically use the 3:2 proportion, for example (a hangover from 35mm film cameras). It also has to do with the sensor size, hence terms like medium-format and largeformat that also came from the days of film, but for composition it’s the proportion of width to height that counts.
There’s a completely natural incentive to compose within the frame you’re given, which means designing your image so that it fits the boundaries and works with those edges. For a long time, working to the frame has been considered – and still is – a mark of professionalism and a sign of skill. Yes, you can always crop here or there to tweak things, but getting it right in-camera has almost always been the recognized ideal. There was even a tradition of making black-and-white prints that included the edges of the rebates (as the unexposed borders of a film negative are called), and its origin was to ‘prove’ the photographer’s skill. It had its heyday in the 1960s through the 1980s, and to do it meant taking the trouble to file out the inside of the negative carrier. This may seem like a mannerism, but its most famous proponent was Cartier-bresson, who used to send his prints out like this to prevent picture editors from cropping them.
However admirable this kind of discipline may be, digital post-production offers a very different alternative based on stitching. Image stitching technology has been around for longer than digital cameras, but the algorithms are now so sophisticated they require no skill and little effort to use, and can easily cope with handheld shooting. By shooting a series of overlapping frames, you can decide for yourself what the frame and format of an image can be. The amount of overlap depends on detail in the image…
The first step in image stitching software is finding things common to each pair of images, but around 30-40 per cent overlap is safe for scenes. The images then have to be warped so they register, then calibrated and blended.
No matter the focal length
The shot here is a case in point. Around the corner from where I live, summer evening sunlight briefly bathed a stormy sky in the distance with a short rainbow, and also delicately covered this house with a vintage VW minibus in front of it. The colour palette was lovely. This wasn’t going to last more than a minute or two, and the viewpoint was so close that the moderate wide-angle I had with me (28mm) wouldn’t cover it. However, I do this so often that I didn’t even think of the focal length as a problem, and quickly shot the overlapping frames shown here.
There’s a wide choice of software you can use to merge photos; I use Photoshop’s Photomerge because it’s built in to the program I use for processing and post. Then I can follow up the stitch with Adobe’s Adaptive Wide Angle filter – which straightens up and corrects any distortion. This was going to be
Our globetrotting Contributor at Large, renowned photographer and prolific author Michael Freeman, presents a month-by-month masterclass that’s exclusive to N-photo, in which he explores his tried-and-tested paths to more creative photography. Michael has published dozens of books on photography, including the bestselling Perfect Exposure.
needed here, as you can see from the angular distortion in the originals from the 28mm lens. Expanding your image format beyond the camera’s frame gives you a wide-angle effect, and this filter was designed for this reason. I’ve included the sequence of using this sophisticated tool.
As you can see from the initially stitched image (I’ve added the green outlines to show how the software assembled the frames), there’s a lot of curved distortion. Collapsing the different layers and then opening in Adaptive Wide Angle allows me to first straighten the curved edges. Holding down the Shift key and drawing a line makes each line either horizontal or vertical. Next, I can straighten any number of lines I like within the frame, and as this is very much a face-on squared-up image; I can constrain horizontals and verticals to my heart’s content.
The result is what I could have shot only with an impossibly wide tilt-shift lens.