wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: Don's essay on ELEVATION
Richard Crowest 2008-Jun-10 09:59:00
In reply to Briar Bentley, Caroling wrote:
> Well, I know that 8 shots aren't enough with a 35mm lens, taken from
> a tower
> that was about 20' square.
It ain't necessarily so! Like Wayne Heil and Pierre Meindre, I shot a
panorama from Coit tower, though mine was taken 16 years ago when I
was still using a DOS PC, and QuickTime was that fun but faintly
ludicrous program that played postage-stamp sized videos on the Macs
in the local office equipment shop...
I'd been taking overlapping rows of images for years, just in order to
lay them out and try and convey some sense of a panoramic view. From
Coit Tower's 8 windows, my old (though then brand new!) 35mm camera
with its 35-70mm zoom lens just gave enough coverage at the wide end
to make a complete circle:
http://corvidae.co.uk/panoramas/coittower.html
Nothing like as impressive as Wayne's, but it does prove that it can
be done, as long as most of the objects in the photo are a long way
off. Of course, a 35mm lens on many digital SLRs with smaller sensors
would actually be equivalent to 55mm or so, and so you would need more
shots.
I love the other tower shots that people have shown, especially the
ghostly bits of structure at the bottom of Pierre's Space Needle pano
- an eerie reminder that there's an awful lot of artifice in these
panoramas that look so real.
Richard
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