A Year in Panorama

Seattle is quiet, and good light is difficult to find in winter. I usually take this time to reflect on my work, and share what I’ve created. If you take a quick look through my Glass right now, you’ve got to scroll a while before you find an image that’s in a standard 4:3 aspect ratio. Much further to find one I took this year, and wasn’t re-surfacing from 2024 or even earlier. So, in short: I spent an entire year with one focus for my photography, asking myself „What can I do with panoramas?“

Why the obsession?

In July 2024, I went to Berlin for a few days for vacation. While I was there, I spent time with a friend of mine who took me to a camera shop in Neukölln, where I picked up a Horizon 202 swing-lens camera for maybe €200.

When I was younger, I toyed with digital cameras. In college, I found my mom’s Polaroid Autofocus 660 SE and used it as often as I could afford to, dragging it along to parties. In 2022, having just moved to Seattle, I was curious about picking up the medium again. What attracted me to film was that I was also looking for a really good fidget toy. Something that felt good in my hands, that I understood how to use and work with precisely. While traveling for the Connections Museum where I volunteer, I found myself in a camera shop in Denver. They had a few easy intro models, the Canon AE-1 and some Olympus I don’t remember. When I picked up the Nikon F displayed a little further away, I fell in love. The feeling of the winding mechanism, the weight, the sound of the shutter. It was perfect. The Horizon has none of these redeeming qualities that I first fell in love with this activity for. Cheap plastic construction, a viewfinder that looks like a Cylon, and a complicated film transport mechanism that wastes probably 4 frames just to load the thing. I was instantly taken with the silly object.

What the Horizon offered me was a very unusual perspective, a way to capture the world as if you were standing there in my shoes, and turned your head from side-to-side without moving. With the ƒ2.8 lens, and a lot of slow shutter speeds, it offered a lot of flexibility, if you could stand still enough, find something to prop it up on, or bought some fast film. I bought some Kodak Gold in a shopping mall, wrote in my Field Notes that I was going to push it two stops, and off I went. Metering with my phone, I found I was able to shoot it as I was moving without slowing down myself down for more than a moment. Raise it, and press the button. Done.

This photo from Hermannplatz is one of the first ones I took with the thing, and I adore it. You’re right in the middle of that moment descending the escalator as the train pulls in. You can hear the doors chime open. „U8, nach Wittenau.“

I spent an entire evening running around the city taking panoramas furiously with a dead phone, in a city I’d never been to, where I didn’t speak the language. A lot of photos didn’t go my way. I was learning the mechanics of the swing-lens (which loves to accidentally include fingers inside the frame), and finding an eye for composing with something so wide. Despite my unfamiliarity, I got a few really interesting shots. A mirrored self-portrait in yellow, and a lonely view from a bridge of a highway and the ringbahn.

Success and Frustration

On my way out of Berlin, I took one of my favorite photos ever. This perspective from Berlin Hauptbahnhof is visually disorienting at first, the aspect ratio creating a sense of vertigo as you can look across the levels of skybridge at people rolling their suitcases between platforms, and also directly down on the roofs of other trains, the people sitting at the base of a column that seems to bend upward toward you. At the bottom of the frame, my shirt, jeans, and Converse: A bewildered spectator. You can quite literally look through my eyes, as if I were a giantess and could step across the trains from one level to another.

In London, I tried some more. Unfortunately, I didn’t explore the tube as much as I did the U-Bahn. Wandering London in blistering heat, I tried a few architectural compositions, but the camera isn’t well suited for them, and nothing really stuck.

Still, I had fun trying. Interestingly, warping the curved tracks of Baker Street in the opposite direction of the tracks worked well. A sunny interior of a train from the center seat made me quite happy. I like experiencing the everyday as I find it, and the camera opened up this possibility that I couldn’t get with a standard camera without a remarkably wide and expensive lens which makes other tradeoffs in perspectives. Spend enough time with a 15mm lens and you’ll quickly realize how ugly most ceilings are and put it down. Widening the captured image without increasing the height was a marvel to me.

New Horizons

Back in home in Seattle, I didn’t really know what to do with the thing. Seattle is quiet, and not big enough to create the complex geometry and dense spaces I’d really enjoyed capturing in Europe. Our metro stations are quite new, and many were originally designed quite spaciously for buses. Lots of dead visual space, and quite dim, too. The Horizon’s viewfinder fell flat when in front of my eye—Everything was too far away.

In the fall, I travelled for work and personal errands. I took photos in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and even Hawaii. Visiting SF for MUNI’s Heritage Weekend is something of a tradition for me, but I was tired, and my interest in photography warped by a spiraling mental health issue. I shot 500 photos, but didn’t develop any of them until February; they sat waiting to be seen for what they were. When I did, I found some really interesting images which reminded me of what I wanted to do with the Horizon in the first place. Most especially, this eerie scene from 24th St. Mission BART station captured my imagination, and brought me back to a creepy moment I had around midnight in a pedestrian underpass on the western edge of Berlin. Clearly, I was still capable of doing something good.

I was back in.

♥️ Thank you to mb for very lovingly encouraging me to start this Newsletter.