Enfolding Perspectives: Photographic Collage

by Simran Gleason

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The Perspectives of Being There

Mist Dancers (gif 232K)
Driving on Mount Diablo on New Year's Eve day in a fog. Can't see a thing. Grass barely greening. Oak trees appearing in and out of the mist.

Tea Garden, Golden Gate Park (gif 216K)
This picture shows the difference between the new perspectives I am trying to create and the extremees of linear perspective.

In the lower part of the picture, I kept to linear perspective, not changing the focal length of the lens, but merely turning the camera to capture more space. The result is that the bottom of the picture looks like a "fisheye" picture.
In the upper part of the picture, I enlarged the pictures successively from the foreground to the hedge, and as a transition from left to right, (in-camera, with a zoom lens), to tilt the ground plane and open up the garden space.

At the right side of the picture, the two views collide, and you can see where the linear perspective seems to make the lantern fall away on the outer edge of a sphere.

the Mount of the Holy Cross (gif 136K)
White River National Forest, Colorado, seen from Lionshead in Vail. In this picture I used a very strong perspective transformation to prevent the picture from turning into a fisheye. The pictures on the bottom are taken with a 28 mm lens, and the ones from the mountains and up with a 200 mm lens. This transformation opens up Minturn valley so you feel you can just fall into it.

The Bridge Over Nothing (gif 384K)
A bridge at Stanford, built by Pierre Coutts, "the Crazy Frenchman"

Iris Garden (gif 156K)
in La Honda, by the little lake as I drive home. This is another of the "perspectives of being there," where some of the flowers are in-your-face close and others farther in the distance.

Wild Calla Lilies (gif 156K)
A field of wild calla lilies in La Honda, up in Cuesta. I had to squeeze and grope through a field of poison oak to get to the little dry stream where these lilies grow. I found out later that they're not really wild, but were planted years ago & left to go to seed.

The Willow. (gif 328? K)
East Grand Rapids, Michigan. Though we're looking almost straight up at the top branches, the tree retains its overall shape.

Sarah Jordan's Boarding House (gif 192K)
In Greenfield Village, Michigan. The boarding house across the street from Thomas Edison's lab, where his workers stayed while they did their time assembling his inventions. The house was originally in Menlo Park, New Jersey, and has been moved to the historical museum outside of Detroit. This picture is taken in a very mild "reverse perspective." You can see both sides of the house.

Simran Gleason