Nowhere to go but up
Vertoramas are powerful alternatives that should be shot sparingly
Widescreen and panoramic formats are the most usual and natural compositions, deeply vertical shots on the other hand are rare, for two good reasons. One is we’ve evolved to look from side to side. Looking up and down – along a vertical axis – is a little unnatural. If you have any doubts about this, try consciously looking up and down a scene rather than horizontally. The second reason, a eminently practical one, is that there are few ways to display a deep vertical image. By deep vertical I mean much more extended than the usual DSLR 2:3 portrait format taken with the camera turned 90 degrees. Laptop screens are horizontal, printed pages tend to be just a little vertical, but then when a book or magazine is opened you have a horizontal double-page spread. Currently, smartphones are the most vertical display commonly available, currently with 9:18 the most popular (that is, 1:2).
Those are the arguments against, but in favour of experimenting with a vertical pan-and-stitch is that it clearly captures attention when you get to see one. More than that, there are some very good deeply vertical subjects, starting with architecture. Think steeples, skyscrapers, towers. In this example, we’re in Tiger Leaping Gorge in Yunnan in the southwest of China at it’s deepest point. From river to mountain peak, it’s 3790m, making it one of the deepest canyons in the world. As it’s also quite narrow, it seemed like a clever idea to handle it as a vertical pan-and-stitch, adopting a long focal length.
However, effective this treatment is – particularly in black and white – it doesn’t overcome the display problem; a very real obstacle, and you can be certain never to sell such an extreme format through a stock agency. However there are ways, and in a series of photobooks that I’m doing for a client in the hospitality industry, LUX* Resorts and Hotels, I’ve been shooting one or two deep
verticals for each destination book. This shot appears in the title Of Tea and Horses, about Yunnan province in China, and the way it’s used is rotated 90 degrees. This isn’t an entirely new idea, although it is uncommon. If you’re familiar with the classic Life magazine picture essay on the Indian monsoon by Brian Brake, the story opens with vertical image run sideways. The Smithsonian magazine did the same with a shot of mine of a cave in Borneo for a story on bird’s nest soup.
Used unexpectedly, this treatment makes a virtue out of a potential problem by commanding attention of the viewer. Asking the reader to turn the book or magazine on its side isn’t such a big deal, and in the case of my book series here, it’s designed to engage the reader just that bit more. I should mention one more thing… in my recent years shooting in China, I’ve become familiar with the vertical scroll painting, in what’s called the mountain-water style; that’s what inspired the treatment here.
Alternative shifting
A tilt-shift lens, known in Nikon parlance as a ‘Perspective Control’ lens, or PC for short, borrows from large-format camera manufacturing ideas – they were big enough to be able to move around the front and the back (known respectively as the front standard and the back standard). Shifting is a simple operation, both mechanically and optically. The lens slides up, or down, or sideways, and its main use is in architectural photography, to avoid converging verticals; which happen if you tilt the camera upward from ground level to take in the building. The sides of the building appear to lean inwards. With a tilt-shift lens you aim straight, don’t tilt, and then shift the lens up to bring the building into view. This is less of an issue now, as it’s easy to fix in post, but the best image quality comes from good optics. Nikon now manufacture more of these PC lenses than ever; in focal lengths 19mm, 24mm, 45mm and 85mm. What’s this got to do with freeing up the format? Shift lenses cover more than the picture area, so you can use them to extend the format in any direction. I’ve used an older model for years to do this, and it has the advantage of increasing the pixel count; which was an issue in the early days of smaller sensors.
As shown here, shift the lens up, shoot, rotate, shoot again, until you’ve completed the circle. Then stitch the frames and select the crop, from vertical to horizontal.
Used unexpectedly, this treatment makes a virtue out of a potential problem by catching attention of the viewer