OT Panoramic Photographs Book

This is off track and deletable. I have just found a book of panoramic

photographs that I consider is very good. Title is "360 (degrees) London" by

Nick Wood (Carlton, 2003). The panoramas were taken with a digital Nikon

and seamlessly stitched together. The book also includes a DVD of

panoramic movies of the same subjects. The photographs are extremely

interesting and worthwhile. The movies are also entertaining because you

can control the rotation and some vertical movement. There appear to be two

other books - 360 New York and 360 Paris. All available on Barnes and

Noble, $25 each. I have no connection to the book.

I am not normally into panoramas but this book is very interesting and the

results are excellent. You could do it with a film Leica and scanner or a

digital. And a lot of time.

If i am not mistaken, the 360 series of book can be found for most major cities, i've seen

them in borders and they are quite nice!

On topic. All the full-sphere panoramics (except the Sydney skyline scene) on my VR page

were taken with a 16mm Leica-Elmarit-R and either R6.2 (older) or M4-P / M6TTL (more

recent). :?)<p>

<a href="http://vr.4020.net">http://vr.4020.net</a><p>

I've been doing this sort of thing for years and have always used film. DSLRs just don't cut

it IMO as the brightness range of full 360-degree scenes is far too broad, especially if you

live and work in countries where the sun is visible in the sky :?) Many DSLR

users work around the brightness range limitation by taking lots of shots and merging

them together. This works well for empty rooms or streets, although you can end up

processing a <i>lot</i> of shots, but you can't really use this hack if you're shooting in-

close dynamic crowd scenes, as many of us typically do.

Hey Andrew, go and have a look at the book first. (I bought mine in Melbourne

2 days ago). The colour balance and colour density are exactly right over the

whole 360 degreees. Not only that, but the framing, composition, etc are also

top. Probably, some colour corrections were made in Photoshop and using a

digital possibly made the process easier. Technically and artistically (in my

opinion) the achievement is very good.

Er Wayne. I wasn't diss'ing the book. Just the notion that this sort of thing can only be

done with digitals, or that it's "too hard" to do with (film) Leicas :?)