madison eich

A panorama is a wide or tall view of a photograph of the region in one’s surroundings. The picture can be in a broken or unbroken photograph. The kind of panorama I shot is called a narrative panorama. This means that the picture itself tells some kind of story. Panoramas can also distort reality. You can take a panorama by taking multiple photographs in the same environment and lining them up or overlapping them to make it seem like one frame. By doing this, I was able to distort reality and change how the environment looks. As opposed to if I only used one frame,  the picture would just look like a normal photograph of my surroundings.

 

When I thought of a part of reality that I could alter into a panorama, I thought of how everything seemed so much bigger when I was little. Small rooms seemed big and big houses seemed like mansions. So, along those lines I thought of something that I thought was difficult as a kid that I could depict in a panorama. So, I thought of hopscotch. I always remember thinking hopscotch was really hard when I was a little girl. But, as I grew older I realize it was always easier than I remembered it being. So, in my panorama I depicted a little girl starting at the beginning of a hopscotch course as if she’s about to play. But, I made the hopscotch course very long as a kid sees it through their eyes, to depict the perceived difficulty of the game through the her mind. 

 

When I took the picture of the hopscotch chalk on my driveway, first I took a picture with my little sisters feet and the first three squares of chalk. Next, I took a pictures of the third bow up until the sixth box. Then, I went back and took a picture of the second through fifth box. Finally, I went and took the last few boxes to end the course. I took the overlapping picture so that when I put them all together, the course would look longer than it actually is. So, now all I had to do is print them. 

I printed the first frame just like I would any other print. I made a test strip, picked the appropriate time, added a filter, and changed the time accordingly. Then when it came around the time to do the second frame in the panorama, I put the film in and took my first print and lined up the two pictures so when i printed the second one, it would line up perfectly to the first one. I did the same for the second and third one as well. When I finished all of my prints, I realized I wanted the chalk to extend one frame more. So instead of having to go out and take another roll of film, all I had to do was make another print from one of the middle sections and rotate it 280 degrees so it looks like a different section of chalk. Then, I cut off the edges of the prints and taped them all together so it looked like one photo and I was finished.