Category Archives: News

Editor’s Pick 360Cities

YorkMinsterScreen_lp2 I was pleased to see that my recent pano of York Minster was selected as an Editor’s Pick on 360Cities. The picture on the left is a stereographic projection of the equirectangular panorama taken underneath the Quire Screen.

I had the pleasure of visiting York for several days and was able to take a few panoramas of the Minster. Tourist entry is £10 (or £15 which includes a visit to the Tower), it costs a lot of money to maintain such a large and historic building so this entry charge is not so unreasonable. Rather progressively, there are no prohibitions on photography or tripods (as long it’s not for commercial use and your tripod won’t damage the floor). For a panographer, this was a great opportunity and well worth the visit.

The main challenge, as is common to churches, is the huge contrast between the darkest shadows and the brightly lit windows. Doing HDR capture is the surefooted, though laborious  default procedure. Often HDR and tonemapping gives impressionistic results, derogatively called the “HDR-look”. It isn’t the fault of HDR capture per se but rather the tonemapping settings that are usually to blame for garish results.

Alternatively with some judicious bracketing of just the relevant areas, one can produce decent results by exposure blending the shadow and highlights. This is what I have done here, using a moderate amount of exposure compensation on the brightly lit East and West ends of the Minster to retain some detail that would otherwise have been washed out.

Addendum

Two more panos from York were selected as Editor’s Picks at 360Cities. The first one was taken in the Chapter House of the Minster. The second was taken outside next to the Minster and the Roman Column.

Featured Photographer on 360Cities

20150901_360CitiesFeaturedPhotog_cropI received some pleasant news today, I have been chosen to be one of the featured photographers on 360Cities.net this month: “Daniel is based in Glasgow (Scotland). He started with B&W film photography but then moved to digital and panoramic photography. Check out his more than 200 wonderful panoramas for careful exposure and composition. High quality with visual impact.”

Prints of my panoramas are available, contact me for pricing.  They are available in a variety of sizes and can be printed on photographic paper or canvas. Panoramas can also be licensed through 360Cities.

Oculus Rift Licenses Panos

Glasgow CathedralI received a pleasant but unexpected message from 360Cities last week, 3 of my panoramas were included in a set of 200 panoramas licensed to Oculus Rift to demonstrate their virtual reality head display. The panoramas chosen were Super Tree Grove in Singapore, Glasgow University Undercroft, and Glasgow Cathedral at Night (shown). I look forward to being able to view spherical panoramas in a fully immersive manner.

Here is a video of John Carmack talking about Oculus Rift and panoramas from 360Cities.

Editor’s Pick at 360Cities

Chantry_lpMy pano of the Cantilupe Chantry in Lincoln Cathedral was made an Editor’s Pick at 360Cities.net. The sculpture featured in the chantry is by Aidan Hart.

Technical details (for those who care about such things): NEX-7 + 8mm/2.8 Samyang Fisheye. Shot at f/5.6 ISO100, various shutter speeds using my battered by trusty Nodal Ninja 3 panohead. I took a standard set of exposures as well as some at -3EV  to capture the stained glass.

The raw files were imported into Lightroom and exported as TIFs for assembly in Hugin. After assembly, I produced three sets of complete panos each optimised for shadow, mid and highlight detail. I ran these through Enfuse to produce an exposure blended photo after which some minor tweaking was done to the brightness curve, colours, and sharpness.

Season’s Greetings

Merry Christmas to all and a Happy New Year for 2014. I was playing around with the Christmas tree and some LED lights. I used the NEX-7 with the 50mm/1.8 OSS at ISO100. The spectrum of the LED lights are fairly narrowband so lie very close to the edges of the CIE colourspace diagram giving very saturated hues.