Michael Natale on using panoramic photography, or panos, to document an East Village in transition.
“I’ve taken it upon myself to document my neighborhood in the GammaBlog. Change around here sneaks up on you. Getting it on camera before it is gone is good, I think. The panorama format is ideal for this.”
Cooper Square
“In the middle of this pano is 35 Cooper Square. Neighbors have gathered to save this 1825 building, it is currently threatened with demolition.”
St. Mark’s Church
“Lately I’ve been using the free demo of Autostitch to create the panoramas. You can use another free program, Irfan View to color correct and crop. I would not have attempted to do this panorama of the church viewed through the trees using only Photoshop, matching those branches would be a nightmare.”
Tompkins Square Park and the Christadora
“Context, that’s a great use for panoramas. I’m taking as many architectural panos as I can before the leaves return and obscure the buildings.”
At the Intersection of Spring and Elizabeth
“Autostitch creates spherical distortions in the photos. It’s a bit like using a fish-eye lens. The results are a bit disorienting, but sometimes lovely.”
Tompkins Square Library
“Unfortunately detail is mostly lost in displaying panoramas on the web. Here I added inserts for detail.”
Skewville
“Panoramas are useful indoors as well. This is two photos stitched together in Photoshop.”
Astor Place
“Multi-photo panoramas with a single camera are necessarily a trip through time. I try to avoid temporal anomalies, but here you can see the same woman twinned in this photo.”
Brooklyn Bridge and Bikers
“A view of the Brooklyn Bridge.”
11 Spring Street
“Gathering for the exhibition of Street Art at 11 Spring Street.”
Bowery Ghost, June 2009
“A vertical panorama, named for the milky luminescence of the building at night. I also call it the spaceship hotel. You can see 35 Cooper Square here as well.”
Michael Natale is a community contributor to The Local East Village. His photography can also be viewed at gammablog.com. To see larger versions of the photographs in this post, click on an image to visit Mr. Natale’s Flickr photostream.
