ABOUT the Panoramas 3: Post-Production

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Chris now had two strands of work progressing in tandem: Sussex and London. In town he brought his camera down from the balcony - and struggled. The frenetic nature of the city streets proved difficult to capture in multi shot panoramas.  He needed a re-think and again returned to Sussex to experiment:

"...I had the idea that I might be able to combat the problem by expanding on something I'd tried in a South Downs image called "The Wiston Bostal Track". In that I'd taken several shots of various people walking up the track and applied some compositional selection in post production (see detail illustration, right). If I took a lot of extra, more spontaneous shots of people that happened past in a crowded location I might be able to repeat this process en-masse".

Of the early trials "Premier Enclosure, Fontwell Park" (Sept 2007), was the first to push this idea. The shoot lasted all afternoon - through several consecutive races in fact. Ultimately all of the figures are shown in the positions they were photographed in. It's just that they weren't all there at the same time. The method of re-inserting them in post production was, at this early stage in the tirals, fraught with technical difficulties so Chris was careful to "back up" the image at various stages throughout the process. It is some of these "image states" that we are now using below to illustrate how the image at large evolved.

Notably, some figures were tried out and subsequently deleted - as the image seemed to require.