180 Megapixel Westgate Panorama

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At the end of February I lugged my camera and tripod up to the flagtower of Canterbury’s Westgate. The tower isn’t accessible to the public and it took a while to get permission to shoot from this wonderful vantage point, which offers one of the best views of the cathedral and the city centre. So I climbed the metal steps past an owl statuette that’s meant to scare away the pigeons and got my tripod set up next to the flagpole. It’s not hard to tell why Westgate’s highest tower isn’t open for the average Canterbury tourist: there’s only about half a metre of space on any side of the flagpole and the wall surrounding it wasn’t very high either.
First off I took the above panorama looking south with the 70-200. It consists of 48 individual photos that were stitched together in PTgui. The resulting panorama had 180 Megapixel – with over 50’000 pixel length it was beyond the limitations of either JPEG or PSD files and I had to save it in Adobe’s large file format (PSB). The version above has been resized to just over 27000px wide.
After that I got out my trusted Peleng 8mm Fisheye lens to create a 360/180° QTVR image looking north onto St Dunstan’s Road, which you can see below. These panoramas are taken in the same way as other panoramas, except that the camera makes a full 360° rotation looking down, then straight ahead, then up. Unfortunately I don’t (yet) have a QTVR panorama head in my camera bag, which is necessary to match the camera’s nodal point with the axis of rotation. That’s why the panorama below has some rather ugly glitches – have a look at the stairs, for instance.
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