Figure 1 – Wingaersheek Beach panorama, Gloucester, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2019.

When I was up at Wingaersheek Beach in Gloucester, MA a few weeks back, I took one of those iPhone panoramas to text to people. Tonight I thought that I would take a look at processing it. It is shown in Figure 1. I don’t think that it is the greatest of photographs, but I was struck by several points, perhaps worth sharing as a lesson of this kind of very wide angle photograph.

The image, to me at least, has a nineteenth century feel. The day was very gloomy, as is the photograph. There was an incessant and dramatic wind. The photograph speaks to absolute solitude, stability, and silence. The wide angle is probably close to 90 deg.- extreme! The foreground, the expanse of sand, is exaggerated, and I love it! The horizon seems so very distant as is the little spit of open water. Over all, I feel like the image was taken on Mars, or at least some alien place, as if it was taken from a Rover Explorer in a crater surveying the surrounding edges. And judging from the houses on the left and the people climbing the rocks on the right(both innocuous objects in the image), we have discovered life on Mars, well maybe not Mars, at least Gloucester then!