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Tripod

I went back to 'the fence' this afternoon.  No, not a person connected to the criminal underworld but the metal barrier constructed around the construction site at the bottom of my road.  I got there then decided I needed a tripod, good job it wasn't far.

After a few hours photographing and rephotographng it, this way, that way, all along it's 150m length, and some sections a bit obsessively so, multiple frames, vertical format, horizontal format, different focal lengths, different shutter speeds, I think I may have done 'the fence'.  Done, apart from the time it will take attempting to stitch frames together.

Stitching software struggles with parallax problems which arise when there is foreground/middle and/or background information which shifts around as the camera is rotated around a fixed point (or even when it travels a parallel line).  So the bloody pain of walking backwards  and getting stuck in a sharp and thorny thorn bush will be as nothing compared to the agony lying ahead trying to make highly detailed panormics.

During the process I was minded (with awe) of Chris McCaw.  He went a lot further.  He travelled around the world with his big home made cameras to photograph the movement of the sun.  His long exposures would result in smoke from the back of his plate holders as paths were burning across the paper negatives.

I've started an art gallery at work (it's a small space, very small in fact, consisting of one side of the big Xerox Phaser printer that sits by my desk).  Last week the gallery was home to a second-hand blouse floating in the sky  by Yuki Onondera (black and white, printed out on 80gm copier paper literally by the gallery itself).  That didn't go down so well, so next week it's a triptych by Chris McCaw, it might do better.  There's a story.