Chapter 6. Studio 06: On the Boulevards
Peet Simard
When taking photographs with regular cameras, I've often been frustrated by their narrow field of view. Since I didn't want to have to use a swing-lens camera like a Noblex, I turned to panoramic assembly techniques to create this picture, which is part of a series of photographs I took of Paris at dusk.
Hardware used
Canon EOS-1Ds digital camera
17–40mm zoom lens and 19mm wide-angle lens
Manfrotto 303 panoramic head
Gitzo Explorer tripod
Power Mac G4 with 450 MHz dual processor
Software used
iView MediaPro 2
Stitcher 4.01
Photoshop CS
Debarrelizer Photoshop plug-in
I've always wanted to photograph this intersection of two of Paris's great Haussman-era boulevards, especially from a low angle and with a field of about 200°. But I couldn't do it, neither with a Hasselblad XPan (no perspective correction lens; field of view too narrow) nor a Sinar (no wide-angle lens wide enough). I tried and failed with a 15mm fisheye lens on my Canon 1Ds: I used the Imaging Factory's Debarrelizer plug-in to turn the resulting picture into a horizontal, but the edges were too stretched and the picture wasn't sharp enough to blowup. (The photograph had to be printed in very large format for an exhibition). To solve the problem, I turned to assembly techniques. RealViz's Stitcher program is excellent, because it can assemble low-angle pictures shot with a wide-angle lens while straightening perspectives and correcting optical distortion.
Photos
Assembly ...
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