Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov. You can read all about him on the wiki pages. He founded St.Petersburg. A truly charming town and probably the most European’ised in Russia. It is probably the nicest place I visited West of the Urals.

I also think this town is preserved better than most other places after the great Wars. There seems to be some authenticity to the architecture and the tallest structures seem to be the one constructed by Peter. And the other tall structure is that or Peter himself. History has it that he fought the Swedes here and made St. Petersburg an important port town too. Incidentally, St. Petersburg was meant to be a model of Modern Russian in the 17th Century.

Since I was in the mode of shooting panoramas, I shot this one as a 7 shot sequence too and made a deepzoom composition. I wished there were some people for scale but it was a sunny but cold and windy day, so no luck there. It is really a tall structure, you can observe the apartments at the background for scale.

If you are reading via a rss reader, please visit the site for the deep-zoom content.

I wrote about the Hermitage in St Petersburg earlier. The place overwhelms the senses and once can pass by a Monet or Picasso and miss it completely. Here are some pictures I managed to shoot.

Click through to picasaweb and watch the slideshow in full screen.

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.

If you are reading via a rss reader, please visit the site for the deep-zoom content.