Never seen these type of images before? Here's how they are made.

They are a combination of aerial photography and Virtual Reality photography. Aerial Photography is what this site is about, VR is added to give the viewer an even more intense experience.

VR uses extremely wide angle lenses to capture as much of what is around the camera as possible, typically 3 or 4 images are taken with a fisheye lens at the four points of the compass, then optionally a shot pointing straight up, and one pointing down. These are then merged using special software into a equirectangular image which covers 360° from right to left, and 180° from top to bottom.

With a kite the platform is rarely stable enough to perform this work successfully, as the images must be taken from exactly the same point so there are no visible errors in the finished product. However with aerial shots there is rarely anything above the horizon, which allows a simplified approach to be used, as pioneered by Philippe Hurbain.

The camera is flown in a special rig with the lens pointing straight down (e.g. RIG05, RIG06, RIG07). As the field of view is 183° then the resulting image includes all the subject and the entire horizon as in the example on the left.

Multiple shots are taken during the flight, and those without the horizon visible as a complete circle are discarded.
After the aerial shot was taken, and the camera recovered, I entered the castle and climbed to the top of the tower on the right of the above picture. By pointing the camera straight up I get a second shot, shown right.

For effect I flew the kite from this location, although at this point the camera is no longer on the kite. From this high vantage point the horizon is clear, with the exception of one small part of the tower roof
After the shoot special software is used to produce a equirectangular version of the image from the fisheye original.

The circular horizon has become a straight line, and the point immediately below the camera has become a line along the bottom of the picture, in the same way as the South Pole on a Mercator Projection map of the world.
The same is done with the sky, then these two images are combined in a package like Paint Shop Pro or Photo Shop.

At this point the remaining roof is edited out, the sky is colour matched to the ground, and the sun is placed so the shadows are correct.

Sometimes a "stock" sky is used if it is not possible to get a good view from the location.
The final image is carefully edited along the horizon, to make the transition from sky to ground as natural as possible.

Note that it isn't important that the kite is clipped at the edge of the image, there is no edge, they are the same point!

Finally this image is used either by Shockwave, Java, or Quicktime to produce the viewable version that the web-viewer sees. A special javascript finds out whether you have any of these three plug-ins on your computer and offers you the final image in that format.

2003 :: 2004 :: 2005 :: 2006 :: 2007 :: 2008 :: POLE :: Pano2005 :: Pano2006 :: Pano2007 :: Pano2008
Photographic Gallery 

All images on this site (unless explicitly stated otherwise) are the property of James Gentles 
under the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 
If you are interested in using any of this material privately or commercially, or seeing more images please email.