Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

Chapter 2. Studio 02: At the Restaurant

Arnaud Frich

Sometimes only a panoramic photograph can do justice to the richness of certain locations. When the subject lends itself to it, you can sometimes even tell several stories within the same picture, which was the case with this beautiful restaurant dining room. To create the photograph, I had to solve two purely technical problems. They weren't necessarily specific to panoramic photography, but rather, were inherent to this very distinctive locale.

Hardware used

• Canon EOS-1D digital camera

• 28mm lens

• Manfrotto QTVR 303SPH panoramic head

• PC with 3GHz Pentium 4 processor and 2 GB of RAM

• Wacom graphic tablet

• Two 17-in. Iiyama monitors

Software used

• Photoshop 7

• PanaVue ImageAssembler 2.12

When I was commissioned to shoot a panorama of the gourmet restaurant Château Les Crayères in Reims, I wanted to avoid two common photographic pitfalls. In many assembled panoramas, the horizon line runs across the middle of the photograph. This always results in showing too much of the ceiling, which usually isn't very interesting. I also wanted to avoid the harsh contrasts that often occur between the inside and the outside of a building, as well as near light sources. For this project, I left my panoramic Noblex 150 film camera behind, opting instead for the possibilities and composition choices offered by today's digital tools: significant lens perspective correction to keep lines vertical, choice of field of view, multiple exposures, etc.

Pictures ...