Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial & Cherry Blossoms

This monument in Washington, D.C. honors Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his role in leading the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a Baptist minister who played a pivotal role in ending the legal segregation of African American citizens in the United States. He led the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom which brought a quarter of a million peaceful protestors to the National Mall in D.C. The nearby Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has become a symbolically sacred site for the civil rights movement where on the steps of the memorial, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Built in 2011, the 30-foot-tall memorial and mountains were made from 159 granite blocks. It’s location at 1964 Independence Avenue, SW references the year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law.

Washington, D.C. is not a large city like New York City with the plethora of tall buildings as far as the eye can see. Rather it is filled with many unique sites and monuments which make up the cohesive whole; one of those iconic sites now being the MLK, Jr. Memorial along with the cherry blossoms at the Tidal Basin on the National Mall. The Washington, D.C. cherry blossom peak bloom in late March / early April attracts an estimated 1.5 million visitors a year to experience the nearly 3800 cherry trees.

I wanted to capture the essence of this monument to MLK, Jr. framed by the flowering cherry trees in their peak bloom. While the added element of people can improve some compositions, I think they’d be a distraction here. The peak bloom of the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C. is the busiest time to be around the tidal basin, where there are hundreds of people at a given second around the monument. However tedious the process, I solved the “people problem” by focus stacking each component image of the stitch. Given my close proximity to the monument, I’d have to focus stack to avoid having too shallow a depth of field in my final stitched image.

A “focus-stack” is a composite shot from the same position with varying “focal slices” that make up a single image. When done on a tripod with perfectly still conditions, software can automate the blending process very well. In this case there were people at some point or another in every frame. That confuses the algorithm and makes automation impossible; therefore I manually blended each image. As long as the focal slice of a given frame didn’t have people in it, was able to manually merge the in-focus sections of each image to end up with a final component image for the stitch that was in full focus without people. All said and done, this VAST Photo was made from over 400 photos from different positions and different focal slices to make the final stitch composite of 40 images (4 Rows of 10). For over an hour I jumped sporadically from one position to another depending on where there were fewest people to capture the varying focal slices of a given position. It quickly became quite confusing, and I didn’t know if it would work out the way I wanted. It was a fun challenge and I was pleased when it finally came together.