The Photography of Robert Cuckler
www.bobcphotography.com
Welcome to my photography website, The Photography of Robert Cuckler, a.k.a. bobcphotography.com.
This site is all about exhibiting the composite (multi-photo) panorama images I’ve been creating. I’ve been surprised by the amount of interest my panoramas have generated; this website is a response to that interest.
A unique aspect of many of the panoramas I’ve created is their wide aspect ratio; you could call a lot of them “ultra-wide.” Landscape photographers commonly like to create panoramas with aspect ratios of around 3:1, width-to-height. Fans of wide aspect-ratio film photography will recognize the 6x17 format. My panorama images tend to be much wider, in the aspect ratio range of 4:1, 5:1 or even 6:1. That makes for some odd print sizes, but I believe in basing the size and aspect ratio of an image on the size and shape of the scene being captured, even if the resulting print won’t fit in a traditional space. When you’ve seen the images on this site I hope you’ll agree.
Most of the panoramas I’ve captured so far are of scenes in the Yuma, Arizona area. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Yuma’s dramatic mountain and desert scenery is a great fit for the panorama format. I hope the wide but still detailed images of multi-photo panoramas will help viewers appreciate the scenic beauty of the Yuma area.
Capturing a great photographic image is often about being at the right place at the right time. That can make traveling to far-flung locations problematic if local conditions like weather don’t cooperate. The advantage I have in Yuma is that the home our family has here is remarkably close to a lot of Yuma’s great mountain scenery. That allows me to look at the local weather conditions and decide on a moment’s notice if those conditions are right for capturing an image. Almost all of the panorama photography I’ve done wasn’t planned; in most cases I’d only decided to try to capture an image 30 minutes before.
Robert (Bob) Cuckler
Panorama Photographer
For the first dozen years of my photography career I was consistently unhappy with my landscape photographs. I found that my landscape photos that had a wide field of view lacked the detail I was looking for. I could solve the detail problem with a telephoto lens, but then I lost the wide view that the scene warranted. The “wide field vs. detail” dilemma was especially frustrating when I was photographing large-scene landscapes like mountain ranges and cityscapes. Then I discovered the magic of composite panorama photography, where a detailed image is composed of multiple individual photographs that are seamlessly joined with specialized software.
My discovery of composite panorama photography opened up a whole new world and a great new way to create photographic images; the “wide field vs. detail” problem was finally solved. The extraordinary qualities of the panorama format inspired me to start photographing the mountain scenery in the Yuma, Arizona area, where our family has a home. Since then I’ve created dozens of high-resolution panorama images of Yuma’s mountains, which turn spectacular colors as the sun sets or rises. A number of those images are displayed on this site.
I took up digital photography in 2009, mainly to photograph products for some of my business and consulting projects. But as a former techie who appreciates art and color, I was drawn to photography by its use of technology for artistic pursuits. Since then I've explored several genres of photography, including portraiture, street photography and most recently architectural and landscape panoramas.
I don't think of photography as a profession or even as a hobby, though I do enjoy creating photographic images. I don’t do photography every day or even every week; it's just something I do when I come across a scene or a subject that I think is worthy of photographing. But from the time I discovered composite panorama photography, I’ve encountered quite a few compelling scenes, particularly in the Yuma, Arizona area. A number of those scenes can be found in the images on this site.
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