Allen Schill
Still-Life Photography

Multi-Frame Panoramic Assemblages - Italy and Ireland

These multi-frame panoramic works were a big part of my activity starting about 1980 and continuing through most of the decade.  Of course, then and later on I always had other competing photographic interests as well.  Since then I've still done them when the opportunity arose - usually when traveling.  Earlier I did them on a more regular basis in my usual haunts - above all New York City (always available, always with a lot to offer) and Long Island (where I grew up).  In the last decade or two it's been more occasional, as I have been more occupied with view camera work.  So the panoramas in this section are of Italy (where I live) and Ireland (where I traveled once).  They are also in color, unlike the older work which was overwhelmingly in black and white.  These, at least, are also photographed with color film, among the last of the work I did with the 35mm format.

Due to the subject matter and the situation, these groups tend to be a bit more scenic than before.  I used to work often in places I knew very well, places that were sometimes not photogenic in the usual sense, locations with a heavy presence of civilization.  I liked especially to juxtapose the artificial with the natural.  (In fact, the purely natural, pristine subject sometimes offered little, perhaps for the very reason of its beauty, perhaps banal, or because, in the case of a highly undifferentiated subject like the middle of the woods, there was little to "grab on to" in composing the several frames.  With some differentiation - which could be as simple as the contour between sky and mountains or water and shoreline, or more distinct, like human artifacts - there was something to work with.

No image sizes are given here, only the proportions of height by width (as they derive from a single frame of a ratio of 2x3 or 3x2), because I haven't made any actual prints yet which would have actual sizes.  As negatives, they can of course be enlarged to almost any size with an enlarger and photographic paper, but this is a bit of a hassle in these days of digital printing.  As you see the photographs here, they are the product of scanning the negatives on a flatbed scanner, and as such they could only be enlarged up to a point, with digital printing.  They were also scanned without removing the negatives from their plastic sleeves, which meant a bit of dust and an occasional moiré or blur.  

They have other defects that any knowledgable photographer will spot easily, such as lens vignetting (scarcely noticeable in a single frame, but evident in a series), that can only be corrected with a bit of work.  (They come from a project of scanning many, many rolls of black and white and color film for the purpose of cataloguing and indexing some decades' worth of 35mm work, and not to have a high-quality image file.  That would mean a great deal more work if done in any kind of quantity, and life is a little short for all that, at least without a studio full of assistants.)  Here they are only intended to give an idea of the work.  For truly high-quality printing, they would have to be scanned again, but with a scanner dedicated to small format.  In that case they could be enlarged as much as any 35mm negative.

For a more in-depth consideration of these works, see the essay "Multi-Frame Panoramic Assemblage" in this part of the site.

© 2014 Allen Schill. All rights reserved.  No part of this document may be reproduced or used without prior written permission from the author. Anyone is welcome to link to it, or to quote brief passages, but I would like to be notified.