Manual Panoramas | Thomas Haley

These manual panoramas were sourced from images taken in the Yolo and Sacramento Counties of California. I took the photographs without any special equipment, such as tilt/shift lenses or a panoramic tripod head. There are no universal focus or exposure settings for all photographs in a particular panorama.

This series was inspired by David Hockney’s “joiners”, which explore human vision. However, unlike David Hockney, who used Polaroids and adhesive, my methods were electronic.

While constructing the panoramas, I only manipulated the images by translating, scaling, rotating, and occasionally cropping. I want the panoramas to look similar to results that could be achieved without a computer. I shot many more images for each panorama than I ultimately used. This gave me the opportunity to select images that fit to other images properly and that gave the desired look in each part of the panorama.

These panoramas act as a study on human vision. Despite exposure differences, contrast differences, and misalignment between individual images, and overall distortion and missing information, viewers can still interpolate an overall scene.