Instagram vertoramas show world in a 'different way'
- Published
"I want my photography to stand out by showing people the world in a different way."
That is Sarah Fouracres' aim when she posts her vertoramas on Instagram.
A vertorama is a vertical panorama, a photograph that sweeps from the ceiling to the floor and is particularly well suited to grand locations like cathedrals and stately homes.
"I'd seen a couple of accounts on Instagram that featured vertoramas and was always fascinated by them," she said.
"It was after an Instameet at Norwich Cathedral, where I came home disappointed with my images as they looked just the same as everybody else's, that I wanted to find a technique to make my images stand out and showcase the enormous scale of the building."
Fouracres, based in Norfolk, challenged herself in April to shoot her first vertorama on a return visit to the cathedral - and has been shooting them since.
"Most of the time I have a good idea of how they will look but every now and again they throw me a surprise and I'm like: 'Wow, I didn't expect that'," she said.
Sarah's pictures, taken on a DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera are usually made up of seven to 15 frames stitched together, with each frame made of three shots taken at different exposure levels - therefore each vertorama can contain between 21 and 45 separate images.
"These over- and under-exposed images are blended with a correctly exposed show to create a frame with High Dynamic Range (HDR) - essentially, an image that mimics how the human eye sees the world," she said.
Shooting the images takes Sarah only a few minutes. "It's the post-production workflow that's the time-consuming part and it can take several hours before I'm happy with the final image."
And the hardest thing about shooting a vertorama? "Finding spaces clear of people," said Sarah.
"Having the odd person in frame can give a great sense of scale to an image but when a location is very crowded it can be a bit frustrating, so get up early and be there first before the crowds arrive."
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