Below is a panoramic portrait of Lesley and Joe's wedding taken in Carkeek Park, Seattle. Click on the image and you will be able to inspect the clarity of detail of a much large version.
Since 2004 we have made more than 200 panoramic group wedding portraits. It is our signature photo at every wedding, whether there are 30 people in attendance or 500. Our clients tell us it is their favorite photo from the wedding and usually the only one they hang framed on their wall.
In a small window of time, usually right after the ceremony (and definitely before the cocktail time) we assemble the wedding party, family and all the guests into an interesting arrangement nearby. Everyone who wishes to be visible, can be seen in the final 12" x 36" print of the picture. Because of the large size of the negative, the image is reproduced with great clarity.
Daniel's inspiration for making wedding panoramas is hanging on our dining room wall. It is a group photograph from our wedding in Bratislava, Slovakia. It was not a planned shot. It just happened as a photojournalist friend Suresh Karadia stepped out on a balcony while our wedding guests exited the wedding palace. He took the shot with a Leica on black and white 35mm film.
Albeit a little bit grainy, out of all twelve-hundred and some pictures from our wedding, this is the one photograph we have enlarged and framed. 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.
But the idea of a wedding panorama did not struck until 2004, when Daniel's Fuji 6x17 camera came along to a wedding in the Yucatan. Daniel had been exploring the panoramic format since 2001, mainly for personal work, mostly landscapes. He caught the panoramic 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," says Daniel. "Koudelka showed me they could express so much more. In fact I am convinced that I see everything now in a panoramic format."
Koudelka was following in the footsteps of another great Czech photographer working 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".
Later, Daniel 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. Our panoramic group portraits are nowhere nearly as elaborate as were Goldbeck's. Still, they are great snapshots of our clients' family history for the generations to come.
