Technical

All of these images are shot with a Noblex Pro 150 UX.

The dogged challenge of a panoramic shot is you aren't shooting what's in front of you but what's around you—you're inside the image. A good panoramic shot takes a lot of thinking and trial and error, and the image is rarely obvious until you look through the viewfinder and spend time with it. The various distortions caused by the Noblex's fixed lens are not easily anticipated. What appears to be an interesting image as one drives down the street is rarely compelling in the unyielding viewfinder of the Noblex.

While the full 360 panoramic images are three shots composited in Photoshop, I don’t manipulate any of my images nor do I enhance color. I typically shoot with Kodak Portra NC (natural color) and during the process of scanning and working in Photoshop I try to bring out the detail, light, and color that’s inherent in the negative. In night photography I often take an extra image to expose for bright lights or hot areas, and will blend those as a layer in Photoshop to show what the eye would see in the actual environment.

The Noblex150 has a fixed lens that's about the equivalent of a 20mm lens in 35mm photography. It's angle of view is 135 degrees. The camera has very limited close-up capability. Its crude shifting mechanism allows one to set the lens to photograph about 2 meters from one's subject, but I find that the best way to ensure close-up subjects are in focus is to shoot at f16 or f22 and utilize the camera's depth of field. This often means shooting at slow shutter speeds: 1/15 or 1/30 of a second or less. And at 1/15 of a second the camera takes about 3 seconds to rotate the lens during exposure. If you want to go to lower speeds (1/8 to 1 second), you have to mount a speed control mechanismthat's about the size of a small Starbucks can. If you set the control to 2 seconds, it simply does two 1-second exposures. It takes fifty seconds for the camera to make 1 one second exposure. It does one full rotation so that the servo is up to speed, then on the second rotation it actually makes the exposure. All exposures are set manually. I carry a Sekonic incident light meter. A tripod is almost always necessary. The camera is not for whiners.

Copyright 2008 by Richard Jernigan