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The Great Panoramic Mask Experiment
I bought myself a SuperSampler Pearl in July. I took it off on holiday with me, ran two films through it and took them to Boots for developing when I got back...
One of the results appears here - a horrible out of focus mess - and they were all similarly out of focus... disaster! The camera had to be sent back... it turned out it was missing its optics so I was effectively getting a pinhole camera effect... kind of cool but not what I really wanted.
While I was waiting for a replacement to arrive I began wondering if there was a way of creating a similar effect with the digital SLR and Photoshop... It didn't need to be too sophisticated because Lomographic style is supposed to be imperfect and I decided to try making a card lens cover with a panoramic slit cut out of it...
The prototype is pictured right - it's not perfectly round because I'm rubbish at drawing round things but it does what I wanted it to do - create a panoramic image with roughness round the edges. It fits over a Nikon D40 kit lens but has to be held in place and works best at a long focal length. The choice of colour, by the way, was random - I was in a hurry to get across London, it was getting late and shops were closing so it was a case of grabbing something from Smith's at Euston Station. The only thing they had in the way of card was a packet of coloured A4 subject dividers... they would have to do, it was experimental after all... The first sheet off the top of the pack was blue...
The first attempt at a photo starred a jolly pink toy robot... It was done as a wide shot in response to a rather baffling challenge on The Daily Shoot. The date, by the way, was Friday the 13th of August, 2010...
The effect was what I wanted and it went up on The Daily Shoot and Flickr to good response - one of my Flickr freiends, Nick Harris commented: "I think you have invented a new photographic style here. Well done"... Mel echoed that and said I should put a "how to" account on this site as a record... here it is.
Anyway, the inspiration behind all this was to create multi-frame "Supersampler-style" images using Photoshop to glue the frames together... The first result appears below - drum roll please... trrrrrrrrrr - Four Funky Robots...
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