Multiple Borders

The "Schwabentor" was a customs boundary some hundred years ago - between "Baden" and "Schwaben", two separate states in those times. It is not exactly located on the border but on a point where all traders had to pass.

I wanted to visualize not only this ancient physical border, but the border between day and night, too. Equinox means day and night have equal length, hence the day and night area of the image had to be equal in size - with a soft transition of course. This questions the borders of our perception: It looks quite real but can not be...

Schwaben and Baden have been united in "Baden-Württemberg" for more than 50 years now, but there are still slight animosities between people of both regions. Hence I have to clarify that the decision where the night and where the day side is located was an aesthetical one only ;-)

You can see the full day and night panoramas on my page

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Europe / Germany

Lat: 48° 49' 26.28" N
Long: 8° 33' 59.23" E

Elevation: 550m

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

Nikon D70 with Nikkor 10.5mm fisheye, Canon 550EX flash unit used independently, three "Carena" slave flashes (also known as "Knuffi"), stitched with PTGui, postprocessed in Photoshop, converted to cubic with pano2qtvr

Soon after "borders" was announced to be the theme for the spring equinox event I thought about a boundary stone - best situated in a clearing between high beech trees and rests of melting snow. And I thought about a day and night panorama.

The equinox weekend I was at my fathers house in the small village Dennach. There where still lots of snow and a biting wind and I didn't find a suitable boundary stone when my father came up with the idea to have a look at the Schwabentor. It proved to be an even better choice.

The original idea of the night shooting was to have ghostly persons between the trees randomly lit by a flash. I knew I had no chance to do this with my usual technique on analog film, hence I borrowed a DSLR (from Holger Fell - panobyte).

It was a dark night but I could not use bulb mode hence I had to run around and fire the flash as often as possible during the 30 seconds I had as longest exposure. Several images where combined afterwards, giving a fairly good lighting. The flash batteries faded rapidly - I used a total of three sets.

The small and cheap slave flashes (called Knuffi in german photography news group) helped a bit, but unfortunately I didn't manage to shoot much "ghosts".

Both panoramas where stitched in one project on top of each other but separately output. The day version was a HDR one.