PhotoProject :: The Cubist Photographer Within

I was looking for some city photos for this week photofriday challenge and came across a set I had taken of the shot tower in Melbourne Central. The original intent was to create a large autostitched version from three series photos, 46 in all, taken from slightly different views. I did create two stitched panoramas, shown below. However they were not really conveying the feeling of the vast space and dome above.

I have always liked photo collage and montage. I still have several I made in the Late 60’s and early 70s from my own prints with scissors and glue. Getting things to match was harder than you might think, so often I didn’t bother and the fragmented results where often more striking than the individual photos. This collage above was created in picasa’s wonderfully simple yet very useful picture collage tool. Its under Create/Picture Collage… on the main menu or you can set up a button on picasa’s task bar on the bottom of the screen (Tools/Configure Buttons…). There are a number of collage styles to choose and in this case I am using the picture pile, which lets you overlap the photos, with or without borders like a pile of photos on the desk. You can resize and rotate the individual photos and more them forward and back in the stack.I have also used the colour picker and selected a neutral colour from within the photos as my background. I have also set drao shadow on, the accentuate the overlapping natures of the images. I am really following the basic “joiners” technique of David Hockney, but instead of using polaroid photos I’m using the computer and picasa collage. The cubists had demonstrated in paint that you could break conventional perspective and photographic realism to combine the subject more convincingly way in space and time, in particular their fragmented assemblage of the detail as tiles are also my inspiration here, to open up the dome above, unlike the fish eye effect any wide angle camera view would create, which crowds in and compresses the aspect.

You can of course assemble collages in many software packages, and a collage like this, or even a more elaborate one, could be easily created any any graphics or photo software that has layers and objects, but picasa