apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I don't mean to sound anal and bullish, but most (definitely not all) the results from the tutorial are really pedestrian. Hockney's work was very well thought-out, and is made as an ingenious statement on realism and photography (I think). The variations in light, exposure, and angle gave the work that sense of a collection of perspectives and impressions (come to think of it, one of the objectives of the modernist movement, applied to a solidly postmodern work). The tutorial specifically skews the creators to manipulate photos to make the "panographs" look like one image. Hockney specifically avoids this by ignoring the the edges of the photograph (you'd think that one photo is a continuation of the next, but variations in focus and exposure counters that train of thought) and the "reality" of the image (the road is made smaller, and the stop sign is perspectively off). Of course, this doesn't include the simple fact that "panographs" mostly involve a few hundred photos at most being digitally shuffled around to essentially create a larger unified image (why not just take a bigger photo, and cut the edges just so?), compared to thousands of photos being pieced together manually to form a totally different--let's say "imagined"--world.

DIY to get the "look"? sure. And I'm sure as well that people do get a lot of satisfaction out of the stuff they make. But without the effort, imagination, and skill applied by Hockney, this is kind of like digital paint/photograph-by-the-numbers. Again, I'm not contesting the legitimacy of manipulating photographs any way you want to, but let's also draw a clear distinction between Hockney and "artists" who just happened to have the time to take that many pictures and the program to magically put them all together like they're a single photo.