Palermo-ramas
A recent trip to Palermo., Italy was very busy and left me with only one evening to go out and shoot. With that in mind I decided to build on a 360 degree panorama with one of the more majestic nighttime sights: the Quattro Canti or Piazza Vigliena. This is where two main roads (laid out by the Romans) meet and separated Palermo into the four original ancient quarters, hence Quattro Canti. The road becomes circular here and at night is mostly closed to cars and becomes the hub to the city’s nighttime street party.
After dark these buildings come alive with projection mapping from the building directly across from it. The projectors are mostly hidden inside windows but some are located on the balconies, it is a wonderfully accomplished piece by the city that everyone comes to enjoy. Luckily for me it rained enough to send people home early to get the square as clear as possible.
Due to my limited amount of time in town I wanted to create some options and the quickest way was via a panorama rig to create a full 360 that would allow for different arrangements once I got home. The amount of light in the scene meant that exposures would be a relatively quick 5 seconds and while taking 40 exposures to get one 360 degree panorama seems like the opposite of “time saving” achieving it in only 4 minutes total instead of typically spending 4 minutes per shot (so about 30 minutes for a panorama) like I usually do at night.
First up, the obvious flat layout showing all four buildings with some adjustment to create parallel lines for the buildings. The corner is on a hillside so not everything lines up perfectly on the ground, nature isn’t always perfect and sometimes images have to deal with that. However, from this one collection of images it opens up the possibility for a few more, specifically a Little Planet:
PTGui is a stitching software that is incredibly powerful and seems complicated but once you understand what it is asking for and which menus to delve into you can create some very dramatic views from your panorama fairly quickly. Your images will be very large, think 500mb, and unweildy, so the thing that will take time is your computer churning through all those pixels more than determining how to arrange your panorama.
By simply, for lack of a better term, “fooling around” in PTGui you can modify your central point in a panorama or little planet and change your image to make the sky the center of the Little Planet. Above, the buildings are shooting outward from the Little Planet with the camera appearing to be halfway up the buildings. Below they are looming over the center of the image and the camera appears to be very low to the ground. And then the top image appears as though the camera is shooting in front of each of these buildings down a street.
However, these are all based on the same set of images combined into a 360 degree panoramic, all I am doing is changing the presentation of the projection to create the image that I want to see. 360 degree panoramas can create options with the right subjects!
