Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

Chapter 7. Studio 07: The Phare des Baleines Lighthouse

Laurent Thion

When creating panoramic photos and interactive QuickTime movies, I generally take lots of photographs, using a sturdy tripod with a specialized panoramic head. But every so often, I like to shoot freehand with a minimum of gear, to get pictures that I otherwise couldn't. This simple way of working certainly doesn't replace multi-row panoramic assemblies, especially in terms of precision, but it has the advantage of being very fast, and can be used in many different circumstances.

Hardware used

• Nikon Coolpix 5000 digital camera

• FC-E8 fisheye converter lens

• 400 MHz Power Mac G4 with 512 MB RAM

• Wacom graphic tablet

• 22-in. LaCie monitor

Software used

• Photoshop 7

• Panotools plug-in

• BBedit Lite

• CubicConverter 2.0.5

Believe it or not, this complete spherical projection was made from only four photographs, taken with an ordinary handheld digital camera. But while the technique requires only minimal gear, it does demand experience—and some serious training. For me, the toughest part of the project was climbing the 257 steps to the top of the Phare des Baleines Lighthouse ("Lighthouse of the Whales") that stands at the western tip of the Île de Ré, on France's Atlantic coast. If nothing else, creating a complete panorama with no more than a handheld camera is very attractive. My goal: to turn the image I capture into a 3D interactive panorama that you can view on a web page with the QuickTime player.

Shots

The faces of the cube ...