Jerzy, last year you won the title of Kolor best panoramic photographer 2012 with the panorama “Bazylika Mariacka (Krakow)”. What did this victory mean to you?

I was very happy. My friends and family were proud of my prize. The priest of the Bazylika also enjoyed & congratulated me a lot. He bought 10 Panobooks!

Could you remind us some details about the shot & the image “Bazylika Mariacka (Krakow)”?

The Bazylika Mariacka is one of the most beautiful churches in Poland. It was very interesting experience. I started to shot panorama at 6 am to avoid crowd and took 7 hours, because there was low light. I used exposure time 1/30 – 10 seconds, Canon EOS 5 MarkII + Canon EF 50mm f/1,4 + Nodal Ninja 5, 71 images + 30 images HDR, Autopano Giga, Photoshop, Panotour Pro.

After your prize, did you lead other projets?

I also made the 5 gigapixels photography The Veit Stoss altar, a virtual tour of Lausanne, the Schweizer National-Circus KNIE and many more. I love this job! In all projects I use my Panogear, Autopano Giga and Panotour Pro.

We have already received more than 1 000 panoramas but I did not see your name in the list of contributors. What are you ploting ?

I will send my panorama soon because this week I have a session in a very interesting place…

Do you think that this year, you will finish in the top 5?

I’m not thinking about winning, I prefer to be surprised again.

Discover Autopano Giga, Panotour Pro & Panogear.

Photo: Röbi Bösch

Mammut, famous Swiss manufacturer of mountaineering and trekking equipment, celebrates its 150 years anniversary! To commemorate this anniversary in fitting style, Mammut is inviting outdoor enthusiasts from all over the world to the world’s most beautiful mountains. The biggest peak project in history is giving people the chance to be part of the action, as 150 teams scale 150 peaks! For this special event, Matthias Taugwalder, panoramic photographer expert, has been called to the rescue…

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On August 3, 2011 on Jungfraujoch (3,471 metres above sea level) in Switzerland, was the launch of the worldwide Mammut project. Matthias was asked to picture the base camp on Jungfraujoch in 360° and to capture the “making of” for the Mammut campaign through several panoramas. Due to a very dense timeline & obligation of result (one important requirement was that even the smallest detail – for example the faces of all participants – should be clearly visible in the image), Matthias “had to resort his gigapixel machinery…”

Photo: Röbi Bösch (Click on the picture to open the gigapixel panorama)

Matthias used a Nikon D3x, a 85mm lens and a Roundshot VR Drive to shoot just under 280 images in 11 rows. The resulting panorama consists of 2.6 gigapixels and allows virtually endless zooming. To complete the gigapixel image in such a short time, he also used the VR Drive ”speed” mode with non-stop release. The weather and light conditions was another challenge that he had to take into consideration.

Photo: Röbi Bösch (Click on the picture to open the gigapixel panorama)

To stitch these images, Matthias used Autopano Giga: “I have to say that shooting such big images with changing light conditions is not that easy, but stitching and post-processing such images is even more difficult. That is why it was clear to me, that I would use Autopano Giga for this job. First, I could use the XML export of the Roundshot VR Drive with the exact image positions to easily import the images into Autopano and already get a perfect alignment. Second, the blender and automated color correction of Autopano was essential to get a smooth result. But of course afterwards there was still some work in Photoshop involved, to remove the last color differences, etc. All it all, it was a work of about 15 hours per each panorama – from stitching to the final result”.

Photo: Röbi Bösch

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More about Matthias…

Born in 1981 in Switzerland, Matthias is a passionate panoramic photographer. The focus of his photographic creativity is the Alps and the surrounding area. He conceived several exhibition projects in the past years about Alpine Panoramic Photography for museums in Switzerland. His company Concept360 GmbH is specialized on the usage of panoramas for media companies, museums and advertising agencies. His clients are for example media companies as Ringier or Gruner+Jahr; or manufacturers of outdoor equipment such as Mammut Sports Group Switzerland.

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More about Autopano Giga

More about Mammut Project

Larmor-jadore home page

You are a professional of panoramic photography and virtual tours. Is there a lot of demand for those stitching solutions ?

Is this why the shopkeepers’ association of Larmor chose you ?

Exactly. They wanted an unconventional website basis to be able to use the photographs for their needs in event communication, the little planets for billposting or POSD …

Frank BZH360

What equipment do you use and why ?

What features of Autopano and Panotour were the most useful for this project ?

What are your expectations for the future versions of Autopano and Panotour ?

Do you have other projects to show us ?

Larmor-jadore virtual tour.

Larmor-jadore Little Planet

Joël, you have a passion for photography for several years now and currently you are exhibiting  ’Cities… in Panoramic’ in your place, Vichy. Can you tell us more?

‘Cities… in Panoramic’ is my 10th exhibition. 35 varied-size printings presented at the Valéry Larbaud multimedia library in Vichy, France, in a beautiful room with a high-quality lighting. From Atlanta to Paris, from New York to Berlin, from Madrid to Rome, from Venise to… Vichy: this is an itinerary widths or in ‘little planets’ which is shown from October 1 to 29, 2011. Stitchings from 2 to 24 photos in order to create classical panoramas but also full spheres that I transform into squares.

Exibition Hall in Vichy

Where does your passion for panoramic photography come from?

Why choosing this theme of the cities?

I spent all my childhood in a little village and to me, the city always appeared as mysterious and worrying. So many solitudes are in close contact. Photographing the city in its whole dimension, which is made possible by the panoramic format, is surely an attempt to appropriate it. I like highlighting the city geometry and its architectural units. And I am often looking for the paradoxical side of images taken by night when the city becomes an empty land.

Joel Juge

You are a mathematics teacher, is there a correlation between image stitching and the logic of maths?

What equipment do you use and why?

What features of Autopano were the most useful for this project?

What are your expectations for the future versions of Autopano?

Do you have other projects to show us ?

‘Cities…In Panoramic’

I am already preparing a new exhibition for November 2011 : first photomontage avalaible on : http://joeljuge.free.fr/Venise01.php

View from Martin Luther King's House : Auburn Avenue

Glass room in Vichy

The Red Bull X-Fighters Freestyle Motocross event took place in August in Poznan, Poland: a nice playground for the Panogear motorized head to show what it is up to. As an expert of the panoramic format, Polish photographer Radosław Piotrowski and his colleague Piotr Galas created a 360° gigapixel panorama of the stadium using the Panogear head and image-stitching software Autopano Giga.

Visit the website showing this big picture and read the interview below to find out more about the Red Bull project and the other great projects of the team.

Radosław, what is your background and how did you come into panoramic photography?

I have run a computer business since 1996. We sell and repair computer hardware. Panoramic photography was a hobby and turned into an even more important business than computers.

You have just created for Red Bull a 360° gigapixel image in a stadium, showing the 2011 Red Bull X-Fighters FMX competition. How did you undertake the shooting? What hardware did you use?

First I have to precise that the project is a common work between Piotr Galas and me. Together we form a FanTag.eu team. I am responsible for the panoramic photography part and Piotr does the programming.

We arrived a day before the event starts to make a test shooting in similar conditions as on the event day. Unfortunately the weather didn’t give a fig about our plans and it gave us cloudburst. Everything was floating in the water. We managed to shoot only a few pictures and we realized we had a pretty huge problem. The spot which was appointed for us was not in the centre of the track. Because of that, the opposite end of the tribune couldn’t be recognized with a focal length less than 140-160mm. The depth of field of Canon 70-200 F2.8 on 5D mkII was also completely at odds with that. Luckily we had taken every possible equipment with us and we decided to use a mast and the Panogear head.

You used the Panogear motorized head to automatically shoot the images. What is the aim of such hardware? What features of the Panogear helped you in the shooting part of your project?

We decided to use it because of one good reason. It was the only way to freeze the shooting remotely on a 15-meter high mast during the results presentation when the light was quite variable. A 145 focal length provided a necessary zoom and autofocus helped us to overcome a focus problem. It is worth to mention that white light was turned on only during jumps, which is under two minutes for one rider.

How did you find the Panogear head in doing the job? Would you recommend this motorized head?

In my opinion, if it was quicker it would be almost perfect. Collaboration with computer is easygoing with Papywizard software. Wireless control allows to move the head back and reshoot an image if it’s necessary, in the absence of direct access. We use masts and poles very often.

After the shooting, you stitched the images using Kolor Autopano Giga software. How many photos did you stitch together? What features of Autopano Giga helped you in this part of the project?

I stitched about 300 images. I determined it approximately because panorama was made of four layers, which overlapped partially.

How did you find Autopano Giga in doing the stitching job? Would you recommend this panorama software?

It was the most difficult panorama we have ever made, regardless the current biggest panorama in Poland which is our 13.5-Gigapixel project of Warszawa360.pl.

Unfortunately with a focal length of 150mm and the short time we had, the image overlap was only about 1-2 percent of the frame. Stitching the panorama took 6 days of work for couple hours a day. Working with layers in PS required another week. We also had other problems. The mast must have sloped a little because one of the shooting series din’t match full 360 degrees. To complete it, we had to use some images shot ad hoc with no light control. A chameleon would be black and white in comparison with those images.

Some of the blurry images had to be replaced with those from the second set of images. Fitting an image shot with white lights with another one shot with red lights is quite a challenge.

Shooting event panoramas has a big inconvenience. You can’t reshoot an image if something went wrong. We had to manually find most of the common points between the pictures. Fortunately, this work was enough to mark proper areas and then let the software assemble the photos by automatically adding more control points. We manually positioned a part of the images because the lack of overlap I mentioned before. Color anchors and image grouping were very useful options.

Do you have other projects you would like to share with us? What are your future plans in panoramic and VR photography?

Sure. Apart from www.Warszawa360.pl, that I’ve told about already, which contains three gigapanoramas and several spherical panoramas we have also made:

- FanTag from a football game, made in October 2010, http://legionisci.com/gigapanorama. The author of the photographs is Piotr Galas, I only stitched them.
- FanTag made in Warsaw University of Technology – http://politechnika.fantag.eu/
- FanTags made for Swedish newspaper Goeteborg Posten -http://wayoutwest.fantag.eu/ , http://ironmaiden.fantag.eu/
- Virtual Tour of Foto Trade Fairs – http://www.vr24.pl/wycieczki/VideoFoto-2011/
- http://www.vr24.pl/wycieczki/giraffe/ both made with Panotour Pro software.

About the future, we have a lot of different ideas. Maybe FanTags from EURO 2012 ? Who knows :>)

Radosław, apart from being an excellent photographer , you are also a reseller of panoramic equipment, including Kolor software and hardware. How would you describe your offer? Where can we find your store?

My company has been solding equipment and accessories for shooting panoramic pictures for three years already. It happened completely by chance, but my current colleague Mauro Contrafatto offered me the distribution of Nodal Ninja heads in Poland. At the moment we have several dozen items in our offer and we are still developing. Our websites are:

- www.vr24.pl – website with information about equipment and software
- www.sklep-panoramiczny.pl – online store with equipment and software for panoramic photography
- www.pano360.pl – website about panoramic photography and our portfolio
- www.fantag.eu – website about panoramas integrated with Facebook. They are called FanTags.

Thank you Radosław for your project and your time. We wish you a great success.

Thank you very much. I will forward the congratulations to other people who helped me with this project – Leszek Cuper and Pawel Cegielski.

Ryszard, what is your background and how did you come into panoramic photography?

Please visit my website at www.ryszardhorowitz.com to become acquainted with my life and 50+ years as a photographer. I’ve become seriously interested in panoramic photography quite recently when I purchased a GigaPan.

You are the author of a book showing panoramic photographs of Poznan, a city in western Poland. Your photos are quite amazing: you used the image stitching in a very singular way. What can you tell us about your photographic choices and compositions?

I’ve seen many traditional panoramic photos around. I’ve decided in my photography to transcend the obvious into something more challenging and exciting. I’ve shot from helicopters, cranes and roof tops. As in the past I’ve put aside any manuals or how to books, and began learning about the available software by trial and error. My book is a showcase of the end result of my experiments. They’ve enabled me to learn a great deal how to handle my equipment and a software for the future projects.

What software do you use to create your panoramas?

I’ve work mostly with Autopano I found accidentally googling the internet, and in a few instances utilizing a GigaPan and Photoshop software. They all offer different effects applicable depending on my needs.

How did you find Autopano Giga in doing the job? Which features helped you create your photo compositions?

I found Autopano Giga fantastic. It enables me to stitch dozens of images seamlessly in record time.

What are your future plans in terms of panoramic photography?

My dream is to continue my experiments working on a book about New York and Paris. Below you’ll find one of my NY panoramas taken in my friends apartment on West 57th Street a few months ago.

Thank you Ryszard for this interview. The team of Kolor wishes you the best success in your future photographic and panorama projects.

Visit the website of Ryszard Horowitz to find out more about his very interesting history and carreer.

You can currently find the book of Ryszard Horowitz in Poland only, but you can contact him through his website for foreign orders.

Henry Stuart is the director of Spherical Images, a London-based company specializing in the creation of high-quality virtual tours. Very recently he released several amazing 360° tours, including St Paul’s Cathedral 15.5 gigapixel virtual tour. In April 2011 he was the photographer of the Royal Wedding gigapixel panorama, ordered by the BBC. The photo shows Prince William and Kate Middleton on the procession route, surrounded by a crowd of thousands of people. Henry Stuart used Kolor Autopano Giga image-stitching software to assemble the 189 images of this panorama.

Henry, what is your background and how did you come into panoramic photography?

I actually did a degree in Biology, photography was always just a passion. Then I saw my first QTVR back in 2005 and was hooked! Started up Spherical Images in 2006 after seeing some terrible virtual tours on property websites and feeling I could do better.

You created the famous gigapixel image of Prince William and Catherine Middleton’s wedding, that was published on the BBC website. You only had one chance to succeed this photograph. How did you manage the whole project?

This was a tricky one, the GigaPan setup I was using takes a while to do a full sweep so I actually had to piece together moments from different times in the day that looked like one moment. Plus I had a second camera setup for shooting the procession hand-held at the moment itself.

What hardware and software did you use to create this panoramic?

Hardware: Nikon D700, Nikkor 70-200mm VRII lens, Gigapan Epic Pro, lots of memory!
Software: Aperture 3, then Autopano Giga, then Photoshop.

You used Kolor Autopano Giga software to stitch the photos of the royal wedding. How did you find the application in doing the job? What features helped you create this big image?

I had actually shot the interior of St Paul’s Cathedral a few weeks before and had struggled to get other stitching programs to handle the large number and size of the images. Autopano Giga, did the stitching faster and better than any other program I tried. It also had the most common sense interface and could utilise the GPU of my computer. Plus, as I was shooting on a GigaPan I could use the GigaPan import option.

What do you expect from the next versions of Autopano Giga?

I would love to see the ability to export as PSB cubefaces, as spherical projections of high GigaPixel images are pretty memory intensive on the users’ computer, especially when looking at the zenith or nadir.

Among all the stages of the creation of the gigapixel image, what were the most difficult parts? Could the whole process still be improved?

The most difficult part was definitely looking for floating heads or half people and other inevitable stitching errors, then finding the original shot and masking over to correct. I don’t though see how this could be much improved in the software unless some kind of masking feature was introduced, although this would not be practical for GigaPixel shots.

Virtual tours and gigapixel imagery are just at their early stage. How do you see their development in the next few years?

I think we are right on the cusp of major take up of the technology. Potential customers are more aware of Virtual Tours and 360s and the introduction of tablets and smartphones has greatly increased the need for interactive imagery. With further integration with other forms of media such as Facebook or Twitter the influence can only spread.

Thank you Henry! We wish you good luck in your future great projects with Autopano Giga

Links :

- The gigapixel panorama of the Royal Wedding

- Website of Spherical Images, the company of Henry Stuart

- Autopano Giga, the image-stitching software application

Alain Hamblenne, an independent graphic designer and teacher of visual communication and panoramic photography at the École Supérieure d’Infographie (Haute École Albert Jacquard) of Namur (Belgium), has just created a stunning 360° virtual tour in 3D and in high definition of the Liège-Guillemins train station (red/blue filter glasses needed).

This station, imagined by architect Santiago Calatrava (who also conceived the impressive Opera of Valencia (Spain) and the Lyon Saint-Exupéry train station) is perfectly suitable for this kind of exercise: the architectural lines and the station furniture make the 3D view really gripping.

Alain Hamblenne used two Nikon D90 carrying Nikkor 18-200mm lenses and mounted on a Maxwell MP-101 motorized head driven by a Photo-Jinn controller. Hamblenne used Kolor Autopano Giga 2.5 software to stitch the images together (2 panoramas of 125 photos) and Kolor Panotour Pro 1.5 software to transform the panoramic images into an interactive 360° virtual tour.

Interview

Alain gives hereafter some details on how he created this nice image:

Alain, how did you get the idea of creating 3D virtual tours?

The origin of my first projects is actually quite simple. Fascinated by panoramic photography and anaglyph images since 1997, it was natural that I sought to combine the two techniques in a cubic panorama. This would not only enable to move at 360 x 180° but also to feel the relief of the scene.
Without really realizing it at the time, it seems that I was the first to incorporate this anaglyph relief effect in a cubic panoramic sequence right from the spring of 2002.
It was after a series of research and various tests carried out in cylindrical panoramas (example 1, example 2) that I published the panorama of the church of Saint-Jacques de Liège, which became a classic of its kind.

For more information about my work on the relief, you can view this page (in French).

Why did you choose the train station of Liège-Guillemins ?

Over the last 10 years technology has changed dramatically. Digital cameras and software are much more efficient. The speed of access to information published on the Web is unmatched with regard to the early 2000s. So I wanted to make a new panoramic image in relief, but on a much larger image. The question therefore arose of choosing a location of interest to showcase this new challenge.
I did not have to think very long… the new TGV station in Liège-Guillemins, designed by architect Santiago Calatrava, was the perfect place because of the architectural interest of this building. I had to get the necessary permissions from Eurogare and SNCB, then I could achieve the necessary shots.

Why did you choose Kolor Autopano Giga software to stitch the images together ?

I used to work on Stitcher software since its version 3.1. As you might know, the latest version is called Stitcher Unlimited 2009 and as its name shows, it has not evolved for about 2 years!
I talked with Arnaud Frich about more powerful software during his visit to our school. Then I decided to switch to Kolor Autopano Giga, discovering a new philosophy of work.
After a few tests to get my bearings and try the different tools, I was definitely conviced by Kolor Autopano Giga with regard to the amazing speed of execution in image analysis, the automatic or manual placing of links between images, the opportunity to work on multiple views at the same time and to easily edit a multitude of alternatives, the stitching quality and harmonization of colors and lights and the other unique features of this software.

Why did you choose Kolor Panotour Pro software to create the virtual tour?

I am very far from mastering this part of the job of transforming the panoramas into virtual tours. I often admire the virtual tours that manage to give value to panoramic contents. In this instance, apart from a vortex effect worthy of the most amazing roller coasters;-) Kolor Panotour Pro especially helped me to publish the panorama of Liège-Guillemin in high quality thanks to its integrated multi-resolution function.

Is this virtual tour your first one in 3D? What are your other projects?

Apart from the first sequences in relief mentioned above, I have only created few others and always as personal research.
That said, I had a good surprise when I won the “First International Digital Anaglyph Contest – Dabiri Award” held in Iran in 2005, with a flat cylindrical version of the Saint-Jacques church.
> Top 10 of the contest (click on the blue dots)
> The flat image

Another test conducted in 2004 at the Blanc Gravier University Sports Centre at Sart Tilman (in QTVR).

For my participation in the WWP (World Wide Panorama) in September 2004, I made a panorama from the underside of the bridge Fragnée (Liege).

A family pano… when visiting my daughter at my parents in 2005.

In 2009, a nearly spherical pano made at the Historic Marine store in Brussels (QTVR).

That same year, the House of Science (Liège) ordered me a relief image in a “View-Master” type (2 separate views) for the exhibition “Diversity of Primates”. Here is the anaglyph version.

I would add that apart from these few productions in relief, I also create traditional panoramic views of course, for a range of culture or business customers, with a soft spot for the comic strip world;-) (examples: The workshop of Christian Binet, the father of the Bidochon, the exhibition The World of Franquin (in QTVR) and a tribute to my friend Tibet gone too soon a year ago).

Finally, I work on a little stranger job for a while now. The digitization of the collection of anatomical jars of University of Liège (Department of Anatomy) as VR Objects sequences which are then used as educational tools in anatomy courses in medicine.

Thank you Alain for these detailled answers ; we wish you good success in both photography teaching and your other projects!

You can contact Alain Hamblenne via the website of his photo studio Outline.

Autopano even supports netbook graphics cards such as nVidia Ion cards. This video shows that the panorama editor of Autopano Pro performs its calculations based on the graphics card power, exploiting all the possibilities of graphic acceleration even on a netbook.

This demonstration was done by Marc Muench, a professional photographer, on top of the Santa Ynez mountains in Santa Barbara, California.

For how long have you been a professional photographer?

I am a professional photographer since 1987; I ‘fell’ into the developing bath very early, at the age of 10 or 12. I had the chance to be able to transform my hobby into an occupation.

How do you work while you take your shots?

I am going to talk about the outside work only, because 70% of my activity is for studio work, both for catalogues and advertising. I am convinced that strictness, astuteness and sense of light are essential, no matter if it is about studio shots or reports.
I always try to analyze the place or the subject to be shot, in an artistic way (to transcribe the reality not necessarily as it actually is, but as I feel it). This is particularly true for panorama stitching, because it is hard to imagine a preview of the final image, on the contrary of a traditional dedicated device, like the Fuji 6X17 or the Hasselblad Xpan.
But the artistic side shouldn’t hide the technical side: the client’s demands, the feasibility, the choice of the best moment… I usually try to get exhaustive information on the weather, the environment, the diverse authorizations, etc.

How did you get to the panoramic photography?

Oddly enough, I got to the panoramic photography by necessity, not by personal research.
In 2000, a business client asked me to make architectural shots of a recently built secondary school, conceived like a rotunda of an ancient train station, with a magnificent zinc rooftop. When I began to shoot, I quickly felt frustrated. Therefore I used the Photomerge feature of Photoshop and I quickly discovered its limits. Then I looked at another dedicated program: Realviz Stitcher; Autopano Pro was not born yet…

What were your first contacts with panoramic photography?

I was fascinated, but it was arduous at the same time. This formidable vision was fascinating; it enabled me to rediscover places. But it was arduous at the beginning because I did a lot of attempts (research of the nodal point, correction of optical distortions…). This was before I discover Autopano Pro.

Do you use a panoramic head?

Yes, I bought the Manfrotto system in 2000. It is very performing, very expensive, and very, very heavy… The problem is, sometimes you have to react very quickly to shoot a panorama (furtive light, instable position, temporary scene…). Moreover, there is the weight, which is photographer’s first enemy when walking, even with today’s photo bags. 400 grammas less are worth it at the end of the day!
In 2003/2004, I began to work for the book ‘Chartres en Lumières’, with the scenographer Xavier de Richemont. All photos were shots during two nights, with an average of 15 panoramic images. It quickly began hard to work like this.

One day, I was wondering about the nodal point of my new box camera on the Manfrotto head, and I realized that the traditional head that I was using could be a panoramic head. Here is a photo, which is better than words:

All you have to add is a fast adaptor and an ‘elbow bracket’. It runs very well with a Canon EOS 5D and a 17-40mm lens!

Therefore my only extra device is the panoramic base, which I still find too heavy. I know other manufacturers produce such panoramic bases, but I didn’t find a small notched tray (very useful when working fast in the dark). For example: those that are sold with the Nodalninja heads, which seem to have a very good price/quality/weight rate. I don’t make QTVR panoramas.
If someone has an idea on how to get a light notched tray, please let me know!
Let me add that with Autopano Pro, I also create panoramas without any head.

How did you discover Autopano Pro?

In an article published in the specialized press in 2004 or 2005, or maybe in a forum on the Internet, I can’t remember.

What do you think of Autopano Pro?

Sincerely: exceptional, not to say brilliant.
Stitching images of a grandiose landscape, many stitching programs can do it well.
Stitching a panorama of the inside of a castle, or other places with sculptured ceiling, frescos, convoluted carpets, etc. is another type of job, and Autopano Pro copes with it very well.
Before using Autopano Pro, I had to manually adjust all my images to correct the optical distortions with the Panotools plug-in, which was helpful but not in all cases.
Then I discovered Autopano Pro and it really impressed me. At first, I hardly understand how it was possible to make such fast, perfect stitching, without monopolizing the entire computer’s power (my computer was a bi-processor Mac G4).
Seriously, I am a photographer, not a graphic designer. I think it is best to spend most the time on shooting. I can understand my colleagues who touch up a lot their images, but it is not my own.
For me, Autopano Pro represents this philosophy. The only retouches that I do are purely photographic: colorimetry (I am very exigent on this point, because of my studio background), contrast, saturation, luminosity, curves, sharpness, etc.
I am going to stop my compliments; otherwise it will be an ad!

Do you have ideas for the next version of Autopano Pro?

Honestly, with the latest version, coming with the blending feature and the Photoshop export, I am fulfilled. I am still loyal to my favorite program to deal with RAW files, and then I stitch with Autopano Pro. I didn’t try a lot the HDR feature, but I will have a look on it very shortly. The only thing that misses is a book dealing with all the potential of the program and tips of other users; but I think it is underway.
A magnifying glass tool should be interesting to implement. It enables to see a part of the image at a 100% zoom, to verify the stitching for example. I use this kind of tool in the program of my ‘Leaf’ digital back and it is really useful.
I think I use only 70% of Autopano Pro resources.

You sent us the book ‘Chartres en Lumières’, for which you shot all the photographs. Can you tell us a bit more about this project?

This project is a narrow collaboration between the scenographer and me. First of all, I have to respect the work of the artist, the unity of the project. I have to be careful on the colors and the crops. Panoramic photography is ideal for this type of work, because the scenographies are often very wide, grandiose. The panoramic format is perfect to restitute some atmospheres.
‘Chartres en Lumières’ enables Xavier to show his talent over the world. We went to Canada, Mexico, Scotland, Spain… and we created scenographies there. The book is like a catalogue of our work.

My only frustration about this book is that I couldn’t shot panoramic images just before the sun sets, which I find is an extraordinary moment with superb skies, because the lightening of the city monuments began later in the evening.

What about your next projects?

I work essentially in business photography; this lets me live (and make my family live) and not just survive.
I couldn’t really involve myself in personal project, because I lack time, but since 2 or 3 years I rediscover the pleasure to make photos intended just for oneself.
I live in a city which has an exceptional architectural patrimony, and I begin to shoot panoramic images almost everywhere and specially from and into the cathedral, to make people discover unknown places or sublime lights. Last year, the city of Chartres proposed me to make an exhibition on the event of ‘Chartres en Lumières’. I printed panoramic images in a very large format (2m x 70cm). This gave me new ideas… maybe another expo or a book.

Visit François Delauney’s website