Hannah Guy's 360 degree trees

I find these interesting for a number of reasons, but a main one being that I tried something like this once in 8x10.

I was interested int he idea of panoramics made from a series of frames and was looking at some of the Victorians who produced 360 panoramics this way, such as Muybridge. Then I figured - hmmm... why not do an inverted panoramic as it where and instead of looking out, look in. So I tried a couple of trees, going around an object, taking pictures looking in from all the points on the a circle.

But I didn't get much further than that - for one thing it took a heck of a lot of 8x10 film... for another, I couldn't quite figure out what to do with them (I actually stretched them out in a series). But either way, I never pursued it much further.

So when I saw these pictures of Hannah Guy's (more info up on Lensculture among other places and some animation here) there was one of those little light-bulb moments - huh. Note that those shown here cover the 360 degrees with just N,S,E and W. The others which are 3 degrees apart are presented as the animation.

Anyway, I like this kind of work which is stretching a few little aspects of photography in one way or another - breaking the single frame, playing a bit with perspective and viewpoint

With her first approach, she made large-format photographs of a single tree in a field, each photo of the same tree taken from four points of view (North, South, East, West). Then she combined these four highly detailed photographs and printed them as one platinum palladium print (as in the photo shown above). She repeated the approach with several solitary trees, garnering unique composites with each attempt.

Then, to capture the same trees another way, she circled each tree with her camera on a tripod, stopping every three degrees to make yet another still portrait of the tree from a set distance. Thus, with 120 still images for each tree, she put them together in a sequence as an animation, which is dizzying and delightful.

She says, "My practice is situated between photography and film. The point at which the still appears to become a moving image fascinates me."