I start with the most recent photograph, glitch1, taken this past week. At this point, I’ve become accustomed to seeing the glitches in the panorama, those black forms. What is less predictable is the overall dimension of the composition. In-camera composition remains my constant starting point and my restraint: no after-image editing. I get what I get. I get how many I get too, amounting to walking around the reflecting pool just the once on any day. 4 sides minimum 4 panoramas. I have also become quite familiar to follow the same walk around the reflecting pool’s perimeter: walking left to right of each side of the pool, one after another, 4 sides, holding the phone camera upon the pool as I walk.
I start at each corner and go, and yet I cannot yet recall with muscle memory how to hold the phone in my hand: portrait view or landscape view? Or neither, more like an on its side view so that the arrow on the screen indicates movement and the panoramic function is functioning. How do I get it to pan while I walk, so that it registers my whole body as the pan movement? Too much panning and it stops and too little, the perimeter of the pool comes into view. How do I pan and walk slow so at the same time to capture that view, that full embodiment of the north perimeter? West. South. East. I know I’ve gotten it right before, and here get it all wrong. It doesn’t ever feel like I’m in control as I come anew to the pool: I can only for certain walk the full perimeter, with panoramic view, left to right (right to left doesn’t work, mechanically).
Glitch1 is one of these days where the walk and the shot are short; full glitch on, suggesting speed, suggesting a mechanical non-compute within the panoramic function at work, and it’s just not of the full length of the perimeter. It has stopped short. I see it now and I remember hearing it right away: the phone camera beeping complete, when it’s not complete. The panorama visually falling short: it is portrait orientation even though the glitches are there. I get portrait orientation when the dimensions could be anywhere between rectangle and square. |