My first thought was of course along the lines of "a flattened n-ary tree representation", but no, it's about real trees, or rather, pictures of them. Well worth a click.
Panoramic shots, knitting things together, doesn't work with trees. They are always moving. You need a single instance where all the pixels are captured at once. One shutter in one camera. Film still has the edge there.
Apples and oranges. Multiple film cameras firing together would also be better than multiple digitals. And you still have similar issues with knitting things together as now each camera is a slightly different perspective.
That’s N times more expensive and much more difficult than shooting single camera though. And, digital sensors have noise, too. Try shooting low light and you’ll see.
Hi, artist here showing up a little late. Working in 4x5 was a reluctant choice at first, as I had little experience with it at the time, but had advantages. The edges of the negative make for a visual cue to the straightening in addition to the buildings. Rise/fall and rear tilt helped get the ideal angle on the tree so that the background structures are square, and in shots where I'm close to the tree, like the W. Hastings one, I'm using front tilt to get part of the tree in focus and also part of the building, which serves to make both the subject.
I think beginning and ending in the analog space (these are silver gelatin prints) make the compulsive ordering -- which feels so digital -- more disruptive than they might be in an image that reads as digital already. They are paired with my Dither Studies, which similarly deal with the computational in an analog medium (acrylic paint), in a show up now with my gallery https://higherpictures.com
This is quite brilliant from an artistic perspective. The world bending to fit in with the tree.
Whenever I walk around I look at old gnarled trees (the few remaining) I try and imagine what they were bending away fr and trying to imagine how their gnarls and bends were created. They have quite interesting stories to tell when you focus in on them individually.
That was my first thought too—but then part of me wonders if seeing the original would ruin the work. Some of the intrigue comes from trying to use the background to imagine the tree's original shape.
Neat idea, but the inverted warp that straightens the tree feels quite arbitrary.
In particular, the facts that 1) the "intensity" of the warp doesn't seem to taper off with distance 2) the branches don't seem to have been straightened in any meaningful fashion.
