Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

4.1. Stage 1

4.1.1. Location scouting and Polaroids

The workshop I chose to take my pictures in was too narrow to allow me to step back very far. The shooting was done on a Sunday, when nobody was working, and took about one day. Since I decided to put myself in the picture, I had to figure out where to place each character, both on the ground and in space. I made a sketch during my visit so I could imagine each person's position and posture.

Making the sketch was a pleasurable part of the shoot, since it let me imagine the scene's eventual composition.

To push the pictorial look as far as I could, I used a 4 × 5 Sinar camera and ambient light—in this case, the neon light fixtures—which I augmented by an unusual balloon light. This is a tungsten unit that spreads its yellowish light in all directions so you can't tell where it's coming from. I tried to arrange the characters in a curve from left to right, to lead the eye through the whole picture. I had originally planned to use six characters, but it was soon obvious that this was one too many. Also, I didn't want viewers to get the idea that this was a montage of a single person accomplishing several tasks one after another, but instead a team of workers—a kind of group portrait.

Having thought through the project and made my sketch,

it was finally time to turn theory into practice!

My aim was to have each character maintain a certain independence, playing his own role while remaining a link in the workshop chain—autonomous ...