Did you put these together with something like the Visual Tour panorama tool? This group has a stitching program, but the photos don't stay that way for very long -- not long enough to "grab" them like this.
I like it -- very cool!

Kent, It was great to see these images. I like the use of the device in constructing panoramas. They remind me of David Hockney's photo combinations from the 80's and early 90's.

Very nice! I like the richness of the connections in this post, the visual and textual metaphors. I'd describe what I'm thinking in more detail, but it's hard to express--I'll just say that I like it all. Evocative in an aesthetic and intellectual sense.

lisa, I just put them together by laying them on a table and taping them on the back, then scanning the result. I had to photoshop out some of the artifacts creating in scanning the areas around the photos and drop in a different gradient background to make them look a little less feeble. But really it's a by-hand assembly of the photos themselves. I have some nicer sets I may post sometime if I can fish them out of a box and figure out how to get the scanner to span them all. I'm pretty sure these were all taken with a pocket instamatic, too. Not digital. Not even any adjustable lens. Not much left to the control of the photographer except silliness like this...

cool. and beautiful. ditto rob on your use of metaphors for the lingering effects of beauty and memory. I am also pleased to know that cutting & pasting is not a lost art.

Encore, encore!!!

lpsrocks, you unintentionally touched on a minor hotbutton of mine. :) This may not be the response you expected:

You may take "solace" in knowing that there are any of a number of junior high and high school teachers out there who have not embraced modern technology, and that cutting & pasting, in hardcopy form, is something actively taught even to this day ... I'm regularly in touch with school committees about the need to teach better tools, of course. (It's not that I think it's bad to know how to use one's hands, but it shouldn't be the only tool kids know or we're not going to stay competitive in the world, if we even are competitive today, which is in ever more doubt.)

In the long run, though, I think the term "cut & paste" is going to go the way of terms like "lower case" where mostly no one even remembers it had a physical meaning beyond its abstract one. (From Wikipedia: “The term "lower case" comes from manual typesetting. Since minuscules were more frequent in text than majuscules, typesetters placed them in the lower and nearer type case, while the case with the majuscules (the "upper case") was above and behind, a longer reach.”)

But yes, I believe in knowing lots of tools and using what makes best sense.

kent - I've run into those teachers, too. And it frustrates me.

I guess I see the other side of my coin in my kids who consult wikipedia, wiki-how, and online dictionaries first, and don't know the pleasure of thumbing through the dictionary or being buried in a stack of old books in the library.

The good & funny side - my 7th grader is working on a project where she has to write about her name and include pictures. She had fun with the digital camera but doesn't have one with her two good friends. She asked if I could "photoshop Nancy in." why not?

But, being a student of journalism as well as history, I have brought a lot of "old-fashioned" techniques to my current job of web design and development. I use a "virtual pixel ruler" instead of a pica stick (talk about a term that is obsolete), for example, but the basics are the basics, aren't they?

I'm apparently the "ditto" commenter today, but -- ditto what Rob said. Nicely done.

It's ok, Saturn. I'm very anti-anti-ditto, that is, I don't think there's anything wrong with dittoing and I don't understand why people are anti-ditto. Why should someone pretend to say something in long form if it's just going to be the same. Why should someone be forced to be silent if they want to agree. What if one person says a good thing in just the right way and many people say bad things--how does that create balance? So I'm a conscientious objector on that front, and your dittos are welcome here.

(Also, you make up for it by posting interesting stuff elsewhere.)

My wife does a lot of hands-on craft work, some of which would be difficult to reproduce on a computer, so I'm pretty pleased to come across examples of work that relies on old-fashioned techniques.

I've never been to Rio but the other two photos are of places with great meaning for me. Thanks.

"...scattered moments,
may seem unframed and incomplete. ..."

Much like life, until it is completed.

UK, it's true ... I went to Rio at Carnaval in the middle of the winter and remember laughing because it was in the 30's when I left New York and in the announcement in Portuguese as we were to arrive they said it would be in the 30's upon arrival ... Ah, what a difference Celsius makes.

I loved the first image the best. I hope to see more in the future from you. I 'ditto' a lot of what other people have mentioned in the other comments about old vs. new camera techniques.

Also: Thank you! I didn't understand the 'rate it' button until you mentioned it. Now I have to go back and rate other blogs Irecently read and enjoyed but didn't have words that would have 'added' anything to what had already been said (beside 'ditto' & 'I agree with what that person wrote')

I really like the effect you've created here, visually and lyrically.

rated

Karin, it's Leblon beach, by the way. Ipanema and Copacabana are farther to the lower left of the picture. But yes, I loved the black and white sidewalks downtown--they were very pretty. I haven't seen what they might have done along the beach since then, so I guess I should check. Thanks for the suggestion.

I love these. I'm impressed that you got them to connect so well. On the other hand, I love the way you middle set differs just enough to give the compiled picture a lot of interest. Like the way the mountain island in the background is darker in the right hand photo.

Yep, that's one of the hard problems about this kind of shot--the developing labs adjust the brightness/contrast relative only to that one photo, so it's highly dependent on what's bright/dark in that one picture, even if it's part of a set of things that wanted to be evenly done. So the brightness of the beach causes that picture to be much more saturated with color, while the lack of that in the other pictures meant the developers had to work harder to get those pictures to look good and they get cranked up a lot more in artificial brightness. I bet I could have adjusted it back in Photoshop, of course. But I left it because it was fun. Glad you liked it, Susan.

Yes, I'm glad you didn't adjust it. The uneven development was serendipitous this time! And I am so glad that my call for some pretty things at this anxiety-producing time prompted you to post this.