Back To Waterloo Lake

I have been making some loose panoramas, including some of Waterloo Lake in Roundhay Park, Leeds.

I call them ‘loose’ panoramas because of how I shoot them.

Articles and tutorials on how to make panoramas by blending a number of photographs say you should place your camera on a tripod. Then the idea is to pan around taking a series of photographs, overlapping each shot with the next.

Then you should raise the tripod head and shoot another string of photos.

And then raise the tripod again, and shoot a third set.

The next step is to merge all these separate photographs in Photoshop using the Automate > Photomerge tool that combines all the individual shots to make one huge composite photograph.

There are also special tripod heads that eliminate parallax distortion.

That is the distortion you get when you hold your finger up in front of your face and look at it with one eye closed, then with just the other eye closed, and your finger appears to move.

These special pano-heads as they are often called, sit on top of the tripod and offset the camera on the tripod so as to eliminate that distortion.

Back To Fast And Loose

Which brings me back to the ‘loose’ panoramas I prefer to take because frankly, sometimes I don’t care about the distortion, which anyway is much less for objects that are further from the camera.

So my technique is to do away with the tripod completely and just take a whole series of overlapping shots handheld.

Why Not Just Take One Photograph

One reason for making panoramas from a number of photographs is to cover a larger area than can be covered in one shot.

That leads to the second reason. While, of course, you can often move back to take a single shot, you cannot get the perspective you can get by raising, lowering, and panning the camera for a whole series of shots that you combine into one photograph.

A third reason for making composites is that the resulting photograph is very big. Instead of the 6, 10, 12, or whatever number of megapixels the camera has in its sensor, the finished panorama can be 100 megapixels or more.

That means you can print the photograph as big as the side of a bus if you wish.

This is a ‘loose’ panorama I took today of the head of Waterloo lake in Roundhay Park in Leeds under a leaden sky.

The park is over 700 acres (280 hectares) and is owned by the local council for the benefit of the public.

Roundhay Park – A Very, Very Brief History

The park was laid out in 1815 and the lake was made by damming up the far end of the quarry that was there.

The work was done by the then recently-unemployed soldiers who had ended their service following the battle of Waterloo and the defeat of Napoleon’s forces earlier that year.

And that is why the lake was named Waterloo Lake.

When I Was Little

When I was very little – perhaps two or three years old – my mum, dad, and I would go out on the lake in one of the rowing boats you could hire.

I can picture my dad rowing, with his shirt sleeves rolled up.

Faintly in my memory I can hear the boatmaster calling out to boats on the lake: “Come in number nine, your time is up,” but I may be confusing this with other boating lakes that hired out boats.

A Phrase That Entered English Folk Language

Certainly the phrase ‘Come in number nine, [or whatever number you want] your time is up,’ became part of English folk language used by comedians and raconteurs in all kinds of situations.

It was so much a part of the language that it was used as the title of a song by Pink Floyd, who re-recorded and retitled one of their tracks to “Come in Number 51, Your Time Is Up” for the film Zabriskie Point.

Foreign Shores

When my parents and I were out on the lake, they would tell me that we were rowing to another country.

At three years old that bothered me because I couldn’t reconcile the idea of ‘another country’ with the knowledge that I could see the land around the lake encircling us.

The Seed That Sowed The Travel Bug

Looking back, I wonder whether the travel bug that bit me was sown when I was told we were traveling to a foreign country on Waterloo lake.

Waterloo Lake Today

Tamara and I came to live in Leeds three years ago, temporarily while we consider our next move.

The boats that used to be for hire on the lake are no longer there, but the cafe above the former boathouse has been spiffied up and we often drop in there after a walk around the lake and through the woods that dot the park.

Note:
There are times when ‘loose’ panoramas produce some wacky results, such as when photographing large buildings close up. I will post some of these photographs in another article shortly, so why not sign up for the RSS or email so that you know when the article appears.

The Tate Modern is the natural gallery in London to show ground-breaking, avant garde artworks. The kind that as often as not might make you shrug, dismiss, and despair of.

I am talking about bricks laid out on the floor so that their only distinctive feature is the ease with which one can trip over them. Or rubber tyres in the shaped of a half-submerged submarine.

On the plus side, I remember some years ago liking a grand piano that was suspended from the ceiling and which repeatedly dropped ten feet while spilling its innards before winding itself up to the ceiling again.

These are personal opinions of course, and you may feel differently. And if not you, then someone else may love the bricks or the tyres. The only constants are that to each his own, and that there is no accounting for taste.

So when I read about Ai Weiwei’s exhibition, Sunflower Seeds, I was spectacularly unimpressed and uninterested.

I had read that Ai Weiwei was considered to be a dissident in China, but beyond that I knew very little about him.

Why We Went To The Tate Modern
The Sunflower Seeds mass sculpture was an afterthought. We drifted towards it after seeing the Gauguin exhibition.

We went to the Tate Modern specifically to see the Gauguin exhibition. It was a major exhibition with paintings from all period’s of the artist’s life. It was a huge and spectacular exhibition and we saw many paintings from all periods of his life. We also learned a lot about Gauguin’s perspective on life and the troubled times to which that led him.

The Sunflower Seeds Exhibition
But of course, this article is not about Gauguin but about Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds exhibition.

As I said, we drifted towards it at the end of a long afternoon, out of curiosity over the sheer size of it.

The mass sculpture that comprises the exhibition is laid out on the floor of the Turbine Hall and covers about one half of the hall.

The one hundred million sunflower seeds that comprise the exhibition trail off into the distance.

To give you a sense of the huge size of the Turbine Hall, take a look at the photograph at the head of this article. Can you see the doorway in the left corner down at the far end?

They dwarf the attendants walking along the narrow walkway that leads to the administrative offices at the far end of the Turbine Hall.

Dust and Health & Safety
I had read that the curators at the Tate Modern had had to fence off the seeds to prevent people walking across them.

The original idea was that visitors would crunch their way through the seeds, but the dust they were throwing up was considered dangerous to health.

The reason for that is that the seeds are not real sunflower seeds.

They are individually crafted, life-sized porcelain sunflower seed husks.

Each of the 100 million seeds that make up the exhibition were made by hand in Jingdezhen in China- a city that has long been associated with pottery production. The video that accompanies the exhibition shows dozens and dozens of people in the city employed in making the seeds – a laudable undertaking.

The seeds were mass-produced in the sense that little balls of clay were individually put into tray moulds and fired in a hug kiln. Then each seed was cleaned and hand-painted, stripe by stripe.

The Idea Behind the Sculpture
So what is the idea behind this mass sculpture? According to Ai WeiWei it is about several things. It is about ‘made in China’ and the politics of a culture that turns individuals into mass producers.

Ai Weiwei comes across as a very sympathetic person in the video, and as we stood in the huge Turbine hall looking at the sea of seeds, we started to be drawn into what we were seeing.

So in contrast to the pile of bricks of earlier exhibitions, we liked this one.

Each seed is attractive; each is different. But from a distance they are very nearly the same.

It left us feeling part of the caring family of man.

Ai Weiwei
By chance after I had written this article, but before publishing it, I saw a programme on TV where Alan Yantob interviewed Ai Weiwei.

Alan Yentob had been refused a visa to enter China, so the interview was conducted by video from their respective computers half a world apart.

I came in partway through the programme at the point at which Ai Weiwei was describing how the Chinese authorities had placed a security camera across the street from his house in Beijing so that they could monitor his comings and goings.

In response, Ai Weiwei had sculpted a number of marble security cameras, and it was particularly amusing to see them lined up on a bench – iconic and unseeing.

It Is Getting Harder To Travel Light
There was a time when I would have been happy to leave my camera at home and let my senses do the recording. Now a camera, lenses, and a laptop are all fighting for space in my pack.

For all that, the guiding principle I have always followed – it is probably in my nature – is to travel light.

Travel Light
I remember being proud of how little my pack weighed as it went on the scale at the airport check-in at the start of my year-long trip to South America.

Just eight-and-three-quarter kilos (nineteen-and-one-quarter-pounds) – and that included a down jacket and a sleeping bag.

Boots
However, it didn’t include a spare pair of boots and I was sorry about that when I left my only pair to dry by an open fire one evening in the wilds of northern Colombia.

I recovered the boots just in time to heat-weld the sole back on to the uppers by the dying embers of the fire.

That mistake was compounded by the fact that I was on a continent where shoe sizes stopped one size below my nine-and-one-half English shoe size.

It was quite some time before I found a store in Quito in Ecuador that sold my size…

However, I still hold that low weight is one of the most important things one can take on one’s travels.

It makes everything so much easier – from putting your pack in an overhead rack on a bus rather than on the roof, to changing plans, scooping up clothing, and getting on the road quickly.

How Many Bags
I also believe in ‘one bag’. Not two bags or three – not even little ones – unless the little ones can fit in my main pack.

One bag means just one bag to look after.

But How Many Time Have I Used That
I have some great pieces of gear that I don’t ever recall using more than a couple of times, such as the fold-flat can opener you can see in the photograph and which I always take with me.

Great idea and weighs next to nothing. Which is probably why I have such a hard time leaving it behind.

So what items have proved their worth time and time again?

Three Great Pieces Of Gear
From all the things I have taken on my travels, I would say the best of all are mini binoculars, a magnifying glass, and a length of rope.

Binoculars
Seeing just about anything through binoculars – from animals and birds to just plain and simple crowds of people – makes carrying the weight of them definitely worth it.

And what you are looking at doesn’t have to be far away. Something that you may not have thought of is that looking though binoculars at an exotic bird that is just 20 feet away can turn a great experience into a phenomenal one.

Magnifying Glass
Picture a lazy afternoon somewhere on your travels. You spy a piece of crystalline stone on the ground or a recently expired insect on the window sill. That is where a magnifying glass comes into its own and a whole new world opens up.

I have a soft spot for this particular magnifying glass – the one in the photograph above. It is Russian, and I bought it in a street market in Tallin in Estonia shortly after the break-up of the Soviet Union.

That was the time when everything from military-grade night vision binoculars to periscopes were on sale in markets across Eastern Europe.

Rope
A piece of rope two or three millimetre thick and long enough to tie down a pack or hang up a pair of jeans. That is something that always goes in my pack.

As you can see, I have bought several lengths over the years…

The last time this item of gear earned its place in my pack was when my wife Tamara and I were cramped into a sardine can of a bunk on an overnight bus journey from Bundi in Rajasthan to Delhi.

Our packs were at the end of the bunk and I tied them against a stanchion to keep them off our legs. That turned our sardine can into a somewhat more cosy sardine can.

Of course, a piece of rope is useful for tying your pack onto all kinds of modes of transport…

Always Carry A Compass
I can’t leave the subject of gear without mentioning that I always carry a compass on my travels now.

However, I didn’t some years ago when I wandered into a forest in southern Mexico and then lost my bearings.

That was when in my mind’s eye I recalled the map of the area that I had pored over before I left home, and realised that the forest was the size of Wales.

For one awful moment I imagined the worst – that I might never find my way out.

A Forested Hill
After trying to get my bearings from the sunlight peeking through the trees, I climbed a forested hill and found that I was standing on the rim of an extinct volcano. Far down below an Indian boy was fishing, or at least he was until he saw me.

With a shout of ‘gringo’ to someone behind him, he disappeared into the trees.

For a while I stood staring down at the perfectly circular lake below me, and at the beautiful blue of the water, wondering how I was going to find my way back to civilisation.

Meanwhile a part of me was wondering how the fish got into the lake in the first place.

The Path Less Traveled
Eventually I made contact with some field workers walking across a scrubby area and they guided me to a path that ran past a terribly poor Indian village and from there it was just a long walk back to the road-head.

A compass would have saved me from all of this time spent wandering around the forest, but then I may not have seen the tiny striped piglets scurrying about that I saw in that Indian village.

Which is not to say that I would ditch the compass and trust to luck in a similar situation in the future. Travel may be a balance between risk, adventure, and safety, but a compass is a small item that packs a big punch when it is needed, so it always goes in my pack.

And You?
What items do you consider to be essential? What are you favorite pieces of gear? I’d love to hear.