Bokeh Panoramas

A while back, while digging through the endless photos on flickr, I came across some amazing wedding photos by New York photographer Ryan Brenizer. This image of a couple on a park bench caught my eye, but I couldn't tell why.

The caption below the photo said it was a composite of 20+ images.

It wasn't until examining more of his images that I then realized that the image was made using a technique dubbed "the brenizer method". In short, you use a telephoto lens that has a short depth of field and small field of view, shoot multiple frames, and then stitch them together to make an image covering a much wider field of view, but with the relative depth of field of a very fast lens or wide aperture.

He's got a video tutorial here. There are now a bunch of flickr groups showcasing images assembled in this manner, and there's also a bit of twittering over #Brenizer.

My brother and I went out for a walkabout shoot this weekend, and I snapped about 65 images which were stitched together to form this image.

We both actually took a few other sets as well, but none of them turned out; it seems that Photoshop has problems auto stitching images when there's a lot of background blur and similarity between frames.

All of the images I've taken so far and stitched can be found here on flickr.