St. Petersburg is the center of the arts in Russia and fittingly, the grandest and largest art museum, the Hermitage, is located here. I have recorded my impression on the Hermitage here.

Hermitage is a collection of a bunch of buildings and is massive in scale. Photographing architecture is non trivial and I usually don’t attempt them either. But the impressive structure of the Hermitage made me pause. The challenge to capture the immense structure egged me to click away. But I had to be careful what I shoot and how I shoot it. I quickly thought about it, the obvious solution is to shoot a panorama. The light was good (about mid noon) and I had a lens that shoots normal (40mm equivalent). I had to shoot from a distance (of course) and I had enough space as the square was large and due to the winter weather there was no crowd either.

I parked myself in the center of the square, adjusted my stance to the center of the building and shot two sequences of 8 shots each (all handheld). I had to check to see if I had captured the exposure and the framing right. Luckily, the lighting did not change (I shot manual exp of course) due to the overcast skies.

The trouble I realized was that, even though I will get the entire building framed in the panorama, I am going to suffer strange optical distortions. You can observe the building tapering at the far end. I guess I need more rigorous technique to shoot panoramas but I will take what I have.

It is not perfect, but a lot of details and the scale is captured in one image. I have to resort to using deep zoom again for displaying the content. Enjoy the imagery.

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This is a start to a sequence of image posts based on some of the pictures I shot in Russia. Starting on a holy note, we visited numerous churches during our trip and each one was them was spectacular. Some large, some small but all of them equally beautiful. I think It is difficult to convey the beauty and details in words and tricky with pictures sometimes. I hence decided to go along in creating deepzoom imagery to really drive the beauty of these structures.

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This was the smallest church we visited in the whole trip. Somewhere in Ekaterinburg and in my enthusiasm, I forgot to note the name down. I am sure someone will step up in filling for my memory loss. Please do let me know the name so that I can have a proper document for interested visitors. Till then enjoy the imagery.

This is the Chapel of St. Catherine and is right here.

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I am unable to find much history of this chapel, but feel free to let me know in the comments.

Note: the view above is composed using stitching 4 images in Photoshop and composing them using Microsoft’s excellent Deep Zoom composer.

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Another Deep zoom composition. As you can see, the technology is not only useful to show off panoramas but one can shoot images at different resolutions and layer them to bring out more details. Microsoft site does a better job of showing off this technology, but here is my attempt.

I should have carried my tripod to get the best possible sharpnedd but unfortunately I did not. High ISO, hand held shots in extremely low light are not the ideal combination. But Still I like this…

The insets are amazing pieces of art and a dying one at that. My dad managed to find working artists practicing the art-form and commissioned these images. Good collection to have.

Technical Details:
Shot with 35mm f/2.0 and the insets are shot with 105mm f/2.5 AIS lenses. All handheld on a D200.

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Another deepzoom image You can say, I like to make panorama’s.

The trouble with tea estates is that there is too much green wherever you look and it is difficult to see good photo opportunity. Especially when you are walking about with a 35mm lens. So I resorted to looking at wide vistas and given I knew I could stitch images and get a good shot, I decided to go for it and shot numerous sequences to be stitched.

Back to this image, the nice 400-500 ft Rock face look very enticing if you are a rock climber and if there had been an op, I would have tried my hands (and legs) at climbing. But the reality is that climbing this rockface is exclusive to the local Irula Tribes (the natives of Nilgiri mountains). They climb this often to get hold of bee hives and harvest honey. You cannot see beehives in this shot but just to the right were a few nicely developed bee colonies ripe for harvest and the locals climb with improvised creeper / rope ladders.

Technical details for those interested:

• Shot using D200 with 35mm f/2.0 AIS lens.
• Stitched with a really cool panorama stitching tool (hugin).
• 5 images shot from bottom to top.
• Some minor adjustments made with lightroom to match exposure and white-balance. Hugin has options to match exposures when you process the images for stitching, I decided to match them manually when pre-processing though.
• One of the shots turned to be slightly out of focus, you will see when you zoom deep in.
• About 12 MB jpeg file made into a deepzoom object using free deepzoom creation tool from Microsoft.

On a separate note, hugin allows a lot of control on stitching the panorama and though a bit more tedious than using photoshop elements, I prefer the output from hugin.

Enjoy exploring.

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I love deepzoom. I posted an earlier image out of my window to try out the technology. It is pretty addictive

So when I went to Coonoor recently, I shot a bunch of panoramic images hoping to stitch them and share. Here is one of them…

I don’t have equipment to shoot a technically perfect panorama but flaws aside, I think the technology allows to share extremely large images with exceptional details. Enjoy exploring the nice vista and have fun finding all the flaws…

To those interested, the panorama is made of 21 raw files and stitched together in photoshop elements. Each image was shot on a Nikon D200, with a 35mm f/2 AIS manual Nikkor lens. I shot them in a sequence by standing in approximately the same place and turning a bit for each shot. Shot hand held and approximately the same exposure settings. Had to adjust exposure to match the brightness of each shot. Some minor exposure adjustments (eye balling) were made in Photoshop Lightroom. The stitched image it a 500MB Photoshop (psd) file and when saved as a high quality jpeg, is about 70MB. Converted using the deepzoom composer and hosted on this site.

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One of the really cool technologies that I have come across recently is photosynth and deepzoom from Microsoft. The core idea behind the technology is to allow people to access large amount of visual information seamlessly. The obvious use case that we use regularly ( I use it almost daily) is maps. There are obviously a lot of uses I can think of for sharing photographic images. Panoramas come to mind. Panoramic images, and extreme Wide angle images are difficult to view because we are constrained by the monitor size. I have not seen good viewers where one can seamlessly see overview and jump in to see details in specific places. The ability to do that is cool.

One of the strengths of the seadragon technology is that they are able to remain resolution independent. Watch this TED lecture to get a lot better understanding of what the technology is capable of. Microsoft has been releasing a series of tools to help people use the technology and the latest tool is the deepzoom composer. To experience some of the cool presentations, one needs to have silverlight (A naive way to explain it is to call it a Adobe Flash competitor) but Microsoft has been very thoughtful to include an AJAX client to view deepzoom compositions.

There are times when we see something that makes us sit up and watch in awe. I felt that when I watched the presentation on Photosynth and I got goose bumps again when I was able to shoot a bunch of images and create the image below in less than 15 minutes. Awesome. Enjoy!

I would suggest you click on the Full Screen icon and Zoom and pan across the image. I have embedded a few high resolution zooms (which are easy to see due to the different exposure settings. Look into them and you will be pleasantly surprised.

I will make things a bit more interesting – Can you find the following images?

If you do, tell me in the comments the approximate location

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