Jeffrey Martin (previously) writes, "I shot this gigapixel image last year in mid November. It's made of 8000 photos, shot with a fullframe SLR and a 600mm lens. It was shot from the
top of Prague's 'Orloj', the clock tower on Old Town Square, built in 1410.
The tower had a scaffolding all over it at the time, going all the way up
past the top of the roof: a perfect platform for a high resolution 360º
photo, if only I could get up there! I actually didn't even consider
trying, as the answer to such questions is usually 'no'. My colleague, a
rather more enterprising Marketing guy, was able to smooth talk them into
saying 'yes'. Wow!
After signing my life away to the construction company who was in charge of
the construction site, I went up to the "top" of the tower – at least, the
top floor where tourists normally go when the place is not under
construction. Then, stepping out of the window onto the scaffolding, and
descending another five floors on rickety ladders and boards sitting on
poles, hopefully bolted together with expertise. The whole thing swayed
lightly in the wind. A rather terrifying experience, at least the first
time. All the way to the top, above the spires of the tower, I attached my
eight meter monopod to the scaffolding (with about 20 oversize zip ties, no
less) and fired up my trusty camera robot, which would allow me to remotely
move and trigger the camera in preprogrammed positions.I did this for three days, from morning until the light faded at around
4pm. When remotely triggering a camera 8000 times, mounted on a robot that
is supposed to move in a programmed pattern, things can go wrong. In three
days, I shot many sets of images, each set between 4000 and 8000 images,
with both a 400mm and a 600mm lens. None of these sets of images actually
yielded an acceptable stitched panorama. There were issues of one kind or
another with each set of images – some images out of focus, some images
overexposed because the sun popped out from behind the clouds for a minute
or two. Thus began a very long and laborious process of combining a lot of
images, shot at different times, maybe even with a different lens, into a
single image.One year later and it's all done. It's not perfect, there are issues that I
would still like to fix. But the result is something I'm at least happy to
share for now. I hope you enjoy exploring this image. If anyone out there
has ideas for what I could shoot next – what tower in what city to shoot
from – I'm all ears!
