the big picture - wedding panoramas
On the wall in our dining-room there is a group photograph of all of the people present at our wedding in Bratislava, Slovakia. It was not a planned shot. It just happened as Suresh Karadia, a photojournalist friend from London, stepped out on a balcony while the rest of our wedding crowd exited the wedding palace after the ceremony. Suresh took the shot with a Leica on 35mm film. I enlarged it to 16” x 20”. Albeit a little bit grainy, out of all twelve-hundred and some pictures from our wedding, this is the one photograph we have framed and hanging up. Everyone is in it, looking up at us and smiling. Each time we look, we are reminded of all who witnessed our marriage vows. It is almost like where’s Waldo. It is our favorite wedding photograph.
After working with standard format cameras for 30 years, I caught the panorama bug from looking at the work of the great Czech photographer Josef Koudelka. I had seen a lot of these large skinny photos before but they never seemed to be more than a gimmick. Koudelka showed me they could express so much more. In fact I am convinced that I see everything now in a panoramic format.
I soon discovered that Koudelka was following in the footsteps of another great Czech photographer to work in the panoramic format, Josef Sudek, the poet of Prague. He put out a book of what he referred to as his sausages in the 1950’s called “Praha Panoramaticka”.
I later came across the work of an even earlier American photographer Eugene O. Goldbeck from San Antonio, Texas. Goldbeck, who began taking panoramic pictures in 1910, was a master of large group portraiture. He re-designed his cameras and built towers to shoot from in order to fit up over 20,000 people into one image.
So in 2001, I bought a Fuji 6x17 panorama camera and began to explore it’s potential.
I mainly used it for personal work, mostly landscapes, until I brought it along to a wedding I was asked to photograph in the Yucatan, Mexico. The bride and groom planned a day of excursions among the pyramids of Uxmal where I made a number of negatives.
By the next day at the wedding, I had decided to use the camera to make a group portrait of the 68 people attending the wedding (see picture below), thinking of my own wedding photo. We all loved the final 12” x 36” print. Everyone was reproduced with great clarity because of the large format negative it was just a small enlargement. After that I was hooked for good.
I have now made more than 75 of these group portraits and it has become my signature photo at every wedding whether there are dozens people in attendance or hundreds. I manage to get them all in an interesting arrangement and usually most of the people are visible. And for most of the people who have one, it is their favorite photo from the wedding and the only one hanging framed on their wall. (Please, view gallery.)
To get an idea of how a large group portrait happens, you are welcome to watch this video clip of nearly 300 Seattle jazz musicians being fit into a panorama on the steps of the Seattle City Hall. A Great Day in Seattle website shows how the picture turned out in the end.
