Every one who visit New York City, shots a lot of pictures. That beautiful City, especially on evening and night looks splendid. When we shot our pictures there, we are sure to be able to capture the same atmosphere we see with our eye…but unfortunately when we are back at home and watch our pictures we discover that something is missing. The light…the magic. These are all elements that we can discover in the pictures of Joerhen Geerds. Just have a look on his fantastic panoramas! Joergen Geerds is born in 1969, Oberstreu, Germany but now resides in Astoria, New York, USA. He studied design and communication in the University for Applied Science, Würzburg, Germany. Inspired by the grandeur and grime of New York City, Joergen Geerds branched into panoramic photography in 2006. Prior to finding his calling in panoramas, Geerds studied photography and design under Ernst Weckert and Nicolai Sarafov in Würzburg, Germany. He moved to New York City in 2000—he had simply outgrown his hometown—and worked for several successful years as an art director in the advertising world. During this time, he refined his love of wide-angle photography and ventured into the world of panoramas. He found the un-cropped cityscapes that his flattened, 360-degree photos revealed were unique in the market. This led him to develop his own distinct style—large-scale, hyper-wide night panoramas of New York City. After showing his work in several art shows in Brooklyn, Geerds did not go unnoticed. Since 2008, he has been represented by 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel in Chelsea, NY. Nobody can explain you better his work, so we are going to use his words to make you discover him and what’s bihind his beautiful work. “I guess you can tell from the title: I love New York, I love panoramas and I love high res images… I love how 360 degree panoramas play with our perception. Left, right, front and back are not valid concepts any more. Combined with long exposures at night, they can show us things the brain and eyes can not normally see and they make us think about spatial relationships in a given environment. The high resolution shows us details of the city which aren’t visible with the naked eye. Over the last years I was looking into creative and economic ways to produce high resolution panoramas. It began with scanning and stitching fisheye shots from my old 35mm Olympus SLR, but was unhappy about the resolution (around 2004). The next step was shooting with a cheap digital camera, with slightly better results. But the resolution&quality wasn’t where I wanted it to be. Medium film looked promising. I got a 6×9 Speedgraphic with curtain shutter on eBay, and modified it heavily to make it a medium format fisheye camera. It looked promising for about 3 months, then it got too cumbersome to scan the negs, deal with dust, color matching etc… too much work with not so great results. But one learns. The setup above gives me much more flexibility, speed, and a great image quality that is the equivalent to a 24×10 view camera, if such thing exists… All panoramas are merged from many individual shots taken with a Canon DSLR, stitched together with PTgui, and edited in Photoshop. Most panoramas you find on my sites are multi-row, multi column panoramas, ranging from 20 to 250 segments (100 megapixel to over 6 gigapixels, shot at 12 to 200mm focal length). This well established technique lets me create those very large prints that you see on Luminous New York and in the galleries. Only a few artists and photographers work in those size ranges (250-500cm or 96-180in width). They are printed at full 300 DPI on a OCE Lightjet on photopaper and mounted against plexi-glass (diasec mount). In most cases I have to actually scale the images down for printing, since the source files are much larger. And to even increase the image quality, I employ a technique called exposure fusing, where 3-5 (or more) different exposures (brackets) are combined into one. This enables me to show incredible details in the shadows, while maintaining highlights that are not completely burned out”. For more information follow the links bellow.
Note: If you are interested to buy Mr. Joergen Geerds’s prints, use his images or if you are interested in his professional photo services (architectural, interior, panoramic, VR, urban landscape, day and night photography), just contact him directly: Joergen Geerds Email: pano@newyorkpanorama.com Phone: +1 646 479 0977 IM: jgeerds Mail: 23-34 30th Drive, Astoria, NY 11102, USA. Visit luminous-newyork.com for the fine art photography. Contact Thomas Jaeckel (www.532gallery.com , +1.917.701.3338, info@532gallery.com) for all fine art sales inquiries.