Now that school has started bearing down hard, I feel the very least I should attempt to do is give you guys a weekly update; still, the amounts of free time I can muster up on the weekends in-between other photography assignments is slim! Speaking of photography assignments, I’ve been getting a TON lately with the full onset of the Fall season. The trees have turned and are losing their leaves, days and nights are getting colder, and the familiar holidays are fast approaching.

Old Morrison’s Own Pumpkin
105mm, ISO 100, f/5.6, 1/5

Last year at Transylvania University, we started an event called “Pumpkin Mania”, where anybody and everybody on campus (and in the community) could come and carve a pumpkin however simply or intricately they pleased. We ended up with hundreds of these small carved pieces of art (some more-so than others!), and put them on display on the steps of the iconic Old Morrison building with its towering, wide front steps.

Continuing the occasion to this year, these pumpkins are lit every night the week before Halloween by small, connected lightbulbs, and produce an intense warm glow in the surrounding area. Inevitably, this draws quite a crowd from surrounding communities!

Tasked with photographing the ongoing event, I wanted to do something special and create ultra-high resolution panoramas with my 105mm f/1.8 AI-s. Why a telephoto? Well, something I’ve found out in my (extremely) limited experience with panoramas is that the longer the lens you have, the less perspective distortion you get (a.k.a. a flat field) when combining exposures, making it easy to stitch multiple frames together with little to no fuss. This flat field also gives the photograph an almost-surrealistic look (like looking at a real-life blueprint) once all the lines are corrected. Continue Reading