New York Panorama

Welcome to my photo blog, I guess you can tell from the title: I love New York, hyper wide angles and high res images.

Visit luminous-newyork.com if you’re interested in my fine art panoramas and prints or contact me directly if you are interested in my professional photo services (architectural, interior, panoramic, urban landscape, day and night photography, including HDRi lightspheres and background plates for 3D renderings).

All the panoramas you see on this website are my work, please respect my copyright on them and do not use them in any way without asking me first.

If you have a killer view from your deck/balcony/rooftop here in The City, I would love to hear from you and come by with my cameras. Early morning or evening and night are the best times for dramatic panoramas.

Why:

I love how 360 degree panoramas play with our perception. Left, right, front and back are not valid concepts any more. Combined with long exposures at night, they can show us things the brain and eyes can not normally see and they make us think about spatial relationships in a given environment.

How:

All panoramas are merged from many individual shots taken with a Canon DSLR, stitched together with PTgui, and edited in Photoshop. Most panoramas you find on my sites are multi-row, multi column panoramas, ranging from 20 to 250 segments (100 megapixel to over 1.4 gigapixels, shot at 12 to 200mm focal length). This well established technique lets me create those very large prints that you see on Luminous New York and in the galleries. Only a few artists and photographers work in those size ranges (250-500cm or 96-180in width). They are printed at full 300 DPI on a OCE Lightjet on photopaper and mounted against plexi-glass (diasec mount). In most cases I have to actually scale the images down for printing, since the source files are much larger. And to even increase the image quality, I employ a technique called HDR, a better term would be extended dynamic range or exposure fusing, where 3 (or more) different exposures (brackets) are combined into one. This enables me to show incredible details in the shadows, while maintaining highlights that are not completely burned out.

History:

Over the last years I was looking into creative and economic ways to produce high resolution panoramas. It began with scanning and stitching fisheye shots from my old 35mm Olympus SLR, but was unhappy about the resolution. The next step was shooting with a cheap digital camera, with slightly better results. But the resolution&quality wasn’t where I wanted it to be. Medium film looked promising. I got a 6×9 Speedgraphic with curtain shutter on eBay, and modified it heavily to make it a medium format fisheye camera. It looked promising for about 3 months, then it got too cumbersome to scan the negs, deal with dust, color matching etc… too much work with not so great results. But one learns. The setup above gives me much more flexibility, speed, and a great image quality that is the equivalent to a 24×10 view camera, if such thing exists.

Self-modified 6×9 medium format Graflex fisheye camera

If you are interested in my work, please drop me a line at pano[at]newyorkpanorama.com or just leave comments or ratings.

Again, if you have a killer view from your deck/balcony/rooftop here in The City, I would love to hear from you and come by with my cameras. Early morning or evening and night are the best times for dramatic panoramas and I need about 2 hours of your time.