Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

Chapter 5. Studio 05: Urban Sphere

Sacha Popovic

I had been making panoramic photographs for several years—classic panoramas at first, then 360° panoramas in QuickTime VR—when one day I decided to twist one of my pictures into a circle, to see what it would look like.

By a complete fluke, I discovered how to create what I call "spherical" panoramas. Needless to say, the results far exceeded my expectations.

Hardware used

• Olympus Stylus 300 digital camera

• PC with 2GHz Pentium 4 processor and 1 GB RAM

Software used

• Photoshop 7

• Stitcher 3.1

• 3ds max 5

This picture is part of a collection I am creating of spherical panoramic photographs of Paris. The aim of the project isn't to make a set of postcards of the city's monuments—extraordinary though some of them are—but to find locations where the spherical treatment would produce an original and aesthetic point of view.

The first questions everyone asks when I show them this collection are, "How did you do that?" and "Did you use a fisheye lens?" This chapter will show you how I did "that"—and without a fisheye lens.

Photos

Assembly

Final image

One of the things I like best about a spherical rendering is

how it turns any scene into a small planet. Each neighborhood, intersection, park, etc., becomes an entity unto itself.