Ranjith
11-18-2010, 10:06 AM
Source (http://www.photoradar.com/news/story/london-panoram-breaks-photography-record?t=1290009248)
As one of the world's top tourist destinations, we've all seen pictures of London no matter where we live. But a remarkable new image by photographer Jeffrey Martin presents the Capital from a view only pigeons and pilots can claim to have seen, and also lays claim to being the largest spherical panoramic photo in the world.
Jeffrey shot his 80 gigapixel (80 billion pixels) image from the top of London's Centre Point tower, which stands 36 stories high at the crossroads of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road. Using a Canon EOS 550D with a Sigma 80-400mm lens at the 400mm end, Jeffrey shot a panorama from each of the four corners of Centre Point's roof and stitched them together on the computer (see his behind-the-scenes images in the gallery above).
'The lens wasn't ideal, but it's all I had,' Jeffrey tells PhotoRadar. 'I shot far more overlap than I needed in each of my sections so that I could join them together easily.'
Jeffrey shot an astonishing 7,886 individual photos over the course of three days atop Centre Point tower, which he stitched together using a Fujitsu CELSIUS workstation.
'In terms of computer time, I only spent about 18 hours in total of actual rendering,' he tells us. 'In human time, though, it required four weeks of editing and optimisation, plus two weeks of fitting the rendered images into a full, seamless spherical 360.'
Jeffrey tells us that his major obstacle in creating this image - which would stretch 35 metres long and 17 metres tall if printed at normal photographic resolution – was accounting for the changing elements such as weather and light conditions over the three days.
'Because I don't live in London, I didn't have the time to go back,' he says. 'I had to simply shoot. As a result, I did a lot of tricks in terms of dynamic range compression and equalising the images, as well as optimising local vs global contrast. Still, you can see there are some obvious artefacts of lighting, sun vs shade.'
Storage was another big concern. 'This was a major unforeseen problem - data storage and management!' he says. 'I did lots of cards swapping, lots of copying – it was a time bottleneck, and I lost some hours there.'
Jeffrey's image can be seen at its full 80GP resolution on his 360Cities.net website, where you can take a virtual tour around the city's urban sprawl, zooming in to people's faces on the street and peering in office windows. Jeffrey also explains some of the intricacies of making his images on his 360 Cities blog.
View the 360 shot here
http://www.360cities.net/london-photo-en.html
As one of the world's top tourist destinations, we've all seen pictures of London no matter where we live. But a remarkable new image by photographer Jeffrey Martin presents the Capital from a view only pigeons and pilots can claim to have seen, and also lays claim to being the largest spherical panoramic photo in the world.
Jeffrey shot his 80 gigapixel (80 billion pixels) image from the top of London's Centre Point tower, which stands 36 stories high at the crossroads of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road. Using a Canon EOS 550D with a Sigma 80-400mm lens at the 400mm end, Jeffrey shot a panorama from each of the four corners of Centre Point's roof and stitched them together on the computer (see his behind-the-scenes images in the gallery above).
'The lens wasn't ideal, but it's all I had,' Jeffrey tells PhotoRadar. 'I shot far more overlap than I needed in each of my sections so that I could join them together easily.'
Jeffrey shot an astonishing 7,886 individual photos over the course of three days atop Centre Point tower, which he stitched together using a Fujitsu CELSIUS workstation.
'In terms of computer time, I only spent about 18 hours in total of actual rendering,' he tells us. 'In human time, though, it required four weeks of editing and optimisation, plus two weeks of fitting the rendered images into a full, seamless spherical 360.'
Jeffrey tells us that his major obstacle in creating this image - which would stretch 35 metres long and 17 metres tall if printed at normal photographic resolution – was accounting for the changing elements such as weather and light conditions over the three days.
'Because I don't live in London, I didn't have the time to go back,' he says. 'I had to simply shoot. As a result, I did a lot of tricks in terms of dynamic range compression and equalising the images, as well as optimising local vs global contrast. Still, you can see there are some obvious artefacts of lighting, sun vs shade.'
Storage was another big concern. 'This was a major unforeseen problem - data storage and management!' he says. 'I did lots of cards swapping, lots of copying – it was a time bottleneck, and I lost some hours there.'
Jeffrey's image can be seen at its full 80GP resolution on his 360Cities.net website, where you can take a virtual tour around the city's urban sprawl, zooming in to people's faces on the street and peering in office windows. Jeffrey also explains some of the intricacies of making his images on his 360 Cities blog.
View the 360 shot here
http://www.360cities.net/london-photo-en.html