TECHNICAL DETAILS
Curt at the Edge of the Barn, Sauk County, Wisconsin, 2017
Leica D-Lux Typ 109
62mm equivalent focal length; 1/500 at f/2.8; ISO 200
28 raw images captured; 13 used for composite
QUEST FOR THE COMPOSITE PORTRAIT
I haven’t gotten around to posting for a while, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been shooting. A lot, in fact! Between travel, family visits, work and the vagaries of life, writing effort has seemed just out of reach. But this Sunday morning in a spot of quiet, I realized after uploading a lot of new material to the site that I’m well overdue on the blog entry front.
Subjects and themes for photos change in the intensity of their interest over time. I love to explore so many genres; I’ve always found it hard to specialize and say “I’m a _____ photographer.” I’d rather just leave out the categorization. But for all the decades that I’ve been making images, I’ve consistently been drawn to photographing people. Lately, that interest seems to be burning particularly brightly, and I’ve been been trying to push the boundaries of my usual style to employ unfamiliar techniques and to expand my horizons. The <Brenizer Method> has been a specific pursuit the last few months. This technique involves creating the look of a large format photograph using small-format images. Basically, a wide angle image has, by definition, much more depth of field than you would find at flattering portrait focal lengths. But the physics of lenses on a normal camera sensor (or film size, for that matter) preclude getting both a shallow depth of field and a wide angle of view. One way to work around this dilemma is to create a composite image made of up many images shot with a longer focal length to achieve the look of a wide angle, yet retain the shallow depth of field the longer focal length brings. Confusing, I know. Making a portrait with this technique requires some fairly advanced skills in Photoshop, as you have to seamlessly blend multiple images together, and when working with people, the smallest of blending issues is immediately obvious.
During a weekend spent around my old haunts in the Madison, Wisconsin area recently, Leigh and I stayed with my longtime friend and former roommate Curt Meine, a noted author and historian. He lives in an old farmstead in Wisconsin’s <Driftless Area>, and the barns and outbuildings at the farm make for a compelling shooting location. So we found ourselves in some beautiful morning light on a Sunday, taking in a last few sights before heading back to the Twin Cities. The open side of a barn with stacks of old wood made for a perfect setting for a portrait. Curt humored me with the process, good sport that he is. It’s not the first time he’s had to put up with this; I have studio images of him dating back more than thirty years! I set out to use the Brenizer Method specifically for this portrait. I shot twenty-eight raw images using my small Leica 4/3 camera, the only camera I had with me for the weekend. The images begin with his face in the center, and work down the body, then in an expanding rectangular pattern around him until all the surrounding scene is captured. Of course, to blend properly you have to shoot fully manually, holding ISO, shutter speed, aperture and focus constant to get minimal variation. It can be tricky, as when you are capturing the outer edges of the image, things are by definition out of focus. Each image has to have sufficient overlap with the surrounding images to ensure you have sufficient material to use in aligning the images when blending the layers. Of the twenty-eight frames shot, I ended up using 13 of them to create this final portrait, taking each into Photoshop manually and carefully blending to the best of my ability to achieve the seamless look of a single image that no camera I own could capture as a single frame. Prior to blending, the images separately received color grading, contrast and exposure adjustments in Lightroom to get them as close as possible to the desired final tone and feel.
Three images make up his body: one of the head and shoulders area, one for central chest down to top of the thighs, and one for his lower legs. The other ten images bring in the rest of the surrounding scene. After a basic composite is aligned, I flatten the layers into a single layer to work on final blends using Photoshop’s brushes, patch tool, clone stamp, and other tools. One of the other benefits and challenges of creating a composite portrait like this is that you achieve huge resolution! The challenge comes in managing the resulting file size. The thirteen-image composite in full resolution here is 10,972 by 16,457 pixels in size, and a whopping 1.86GB for the single image file in Photoshop. That results in an effective resolution of 180.6 megapixels, all from a camera that has only 12 megapixels for a single raw frame.
You can see other images in my portfolios on this site that are also made using the Brenizer Method. They include <this> shot of Randy & Kris Olson in Iceland, <this> image of Leigh’s niece Lucy from a recent family reunion, and <this> one of Leigh in the woods near our house.
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