Koln Cathedral, 5 shot panorama - view enlarged!

5 shot panorama of 157m high twin towers.

Capturing this in a single shot is difficult because there is very little space in the foreground. Even at 10mm (16mm 35mm equivalent) the facade is too wide and the converging verticals extreme. The answer is to take several overlapping shots and stitch them together. If you are not using a tripod, allow a large overlap between images to give accurate stitching. Cheers, RickDB

magnificent!

What can I say ! but just Great, it is an excellent work , Rick, thanks for sharing and the info , best regards //Salvador

I admire your efforts in getting this shot.

It wasn't shift lens mentioned in the technical data and I don't know how the convergence of the lines was avoided with a such a motif and such a wide lens! It seems to me the picture was taken from the ground point?! Maybe the good old PS has done the job!

 

PDE

I can only admire the way you managed to get the whole huge Cathedral into this photograph. The space in front of it is so small, no space to step back. Excellent picture, really, good lighting chosen, great details. Hats off

...I hope you can make use of this technique when you find yourselves with your backs to the wall and a great view in front!

 

Pierre - I have not explained this too well. Perspective correction in PS is key to getting this right. With a single shot on my camera I would have about 7 mp of cathedral to manipulate - the corrections are too much and the image starts to fall apart pretty quickly when you start dragging the verticals into an upright position. The 5 overlapping shots I took were at 22 mm (35mm equivalent on 35mm) and each frame was the full 10 mp - after stitching together I probably had greater than a 30 mp image to manipulate - and this is the trick to obtaining a good quality image after application of large perspective corrections. The final psd file was a whopping 125mb which turned into a 12.5mb jpeg - so you do need some good computing power!

 

Milena, you're familiar with Koln Cathedral and understand the problem well! I'm sure you could use even a point and shoot camera as long as it had a manual exposure function. As for the lighting, I'm afraid I was just lucky as I only had 3 h in Koln before getting the train back to Dusseldorf airport.

 

Cheers, RickDB

well worth the work you put into it. a magnificent cathedral, beautifully rendered.

for you, Rick :-) I have been thinking about your technique. If you like to cope with really difficult tasks then visiting Prague is a must. What is in front of the Dom in Koln is a real golf course compared to the space in front of St. Vitus frontal. Literally a few meters ... :-) (see my night picture, that one without the horse, the front view). So ... :-) Cheers!