Space of the Week: Panoramic Photography from New Orleans by Brandon Ore
"L'heure bleue” is a French colloquialism that refers to that magical quality of light at dusk or dawn when the sky’s luminosity is considered to be the most wonderfully photogenic. Brandon Ore exquisitely captured l’heure bleue in this week’s Space of the Week entitled "The Blue Hour" on Canal Street -- the main street separating the French Quarter from the Central Business District in New Orleans.
Ore started taking panoramas almost exactly a year ago to the day we interviewed him, on October 14, 2013, when he uploaded his first photosphere to Google Views using a Canon T3i and the 18-55 kit lens.
Today, having shot over 1,173 panos he’s unstoppable. He uses a 360Precision Atome pano head and a Sigma 8mm lens on a Canon 5D Mk III. Ore says he’s a hobbyist or in his words a “weekend warrior” panoramist with no formal training in photography and he attributes almost everything he knows about panography from Florian Knorn’s YouTube videos.
We asked Ore how he obtained this shot and here’s what he said: “This image is half-luck, half-planned out. There’s almost no spot on Canal Street that I don’t find photogenic and I wanted to take an image of the Walgreen’s there – it’s old and popular. I had seen a lot of photos of that location that were great but I have not yet seen a panorama. But before I took the panorama, I scouted it out. I walked around the area and thought to myself “If I took a panorama here, what’s it going to look like with the Walgreen’s, the streetcar stop and the rest of the street?” Once I determined the spot I wanted to stand in, then I set up my camera. And here’s where the luck part came in: because as soon as I had everything in place, that’s when this street car arrived. Now if you look at the image, traffic is stopped for the red light, which is really rare on Canal Street, especially on a Friday night when it’s usually jam packed with cars and it's even more of an occurrence that traffic was stopped at every traffic light at that intersection, not just the one I was standing next to. Then I shot 4+N in RAW and that was it.”
But it looks like it was shot HDR.
Nope. It’s a single exposure. Maybe it has that HDR quality in the way I process it in Adobe Camera RAW.
Can you tell us about how you worked the image?
Well, after I fix the chromatic aberration, there’s a button that says “Auto”. So I’ll check out the auto settings and get a very rough optimization of exposure, white balance, highlights and shadows. But from there you have to tweak the settings manually to get the images to sync properly before stitching. And you can tweak it from the “Tone Curve” panel in ACR by using the sliders. Sometimes I grab the curve on the histogram but mostly I just eyeball it. I try to lift the shadows – all the darkness in the image – that’s the area I’m focusing on. Once I’ve got that, then I work on the highlights. Then I click on the “Clarity” adjustment in ACR – and what that does is it sharpens up the image but it also takes a lot of the saturation out. That’s a situation where you just have to play around with it because I have found there is really not one combination that fits all pictures. I have a defined workflow, but when it comes to values, each picture has its own recipe. So then when I have it just right – just the way I like it – then I go with it and I sync it. And that’s how I get that HDR look. Now I have shot exposure bracketing the traditional way and in those instances, I’ll let PTGui handle the exposure fusion.
Technically, the “Blue Hour Image” is really pretty, but emotionally the “Shrine to St. Roch” is pretty impactful. We really love it.
“There are many shrines like that in New Orleans that are hidden and that people don’t know about. The Shrine to St. Roch is particularly historic but I’m not going to bore you with the history.”
Please try to bore us! We’d love a history lesson!
“Well, in 1867 the yellow fever was a epidemic in New Orleans. Rev. Peter Leonard Thevis was a German priest who turned to Saint Roch, the patron of good health. Thevis promised that if no one in the parish died from the epidemic, he would build a chapel in honor of St. Roch. Apparently nobody from the Holy Trinity parish died from the fever in either the epidemic of 1867 or the one in 1878. So Thevis fulfilled his promise and built this shrine. It was severely damaged when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.”
But like we said, this space hit us on an emotional level. What was it like to shoot it?
“The shrine is located in a little unassuming room. I mean it’s literally about the size of a broom closet. I barely had enough room for me and the tripod to fit. And in that shrine, people leave behind mementoes and tokens of gratitude to St. Roch for having had a miraculous healing from all sorts of afflictions. I mean they leave things like prosthetics, glass eyeballs, and crutches as a testament to being healed by the power of God. Of course, being in a room like that, it is a very powerful experience because there’s a lot of personal stories in there and if you look around at the space, there are pictures of people in good health with notes and prayers on the back of them. “
Do you have anymore panoramas from New Orleans to share on Roundme?
“I do so much photography in New Orleans that even the folks in Baton Rouge where I live joke that New Orleans is my second home.”
We look forward to seeing more of Brandon Ore's wonderful panoramas of the area on Roundme. Thank you so much for sharing your precious free time with us for this interview!
When not busy researching and writing his thesis for his Ph.D. in Biochemistry at Louisiana State University, Brandon Ore is snapping up panoramas in the Deep South region of the United States for what he says “is a relaxing hobby”. You can see more of his tours on Roundme here or visit his Flickr portfolio here.