Hi all -

In a little under 2 weeks' time, I've got the opportunity to re-visit the site where I shot the 45 Gigapixel image of Dubai, but with an important difference.

That image was shot back in April from a corner of the building, enabing a roughly 240x45 degree field of view. At the time, the building wasn't topped out, but it now is. To get some perspective, the height of the building is about the same as the height of the top floor of the Eiffel Tower.

And there's a crane still on top of it, which you can see here -



The opportunity is to go up that crane, to the crow's nest above the cabin and shoot another panorama. This time I'll be able to do a full 360 degree horizontal, with I'm guessing something of the order of a 60 degree vertical FoV in order to maximise the amount of ground in the panorama and including the full height of the Burj Khalifa in shot. If I'm really fortunate, the boom of the crane will already have been removed by the time I go up it, and the view will be totally uninterrupted.

I cannot think of a more ideal position to shoot a 360 degree multi-gigapixel panorama from. It's very high up, with nothing of similar height close by to block out a large proportion of the field of view.

Kit choice:

5D Mk II, 7D
300mm f/2.8
1.4x and 2.0x extenders.

I had been thinking of attempting to smash the gigapixel record. but there are so many things that could go wrong. If I ended up getting nothing, I'd be gutted.

More recently, I've been thinking that maybe I should go for the best possible quality I can. Maybe I should just shoot the 5D and 300mm with no teleconverter?

Here's how (I think) the numbers roughly stack up (all with the 300, assuming 25% overlap):

5D: 1200 shots, 14GP
5D 1.4x: 2400 shots, 28 GP
5D 2.0x: 4900 shots, 58 GP

7D: 3100 shots, 31 GP
7D, 1.4x: 6194 shots, 62 GP
7D, 2.0x: 13000 shots, 130 GP

I'm discounting the 7D on its own and with the 1.4 teleconverter simply because the output is so close to the 5D with teleconverters that I don't think there's any point given I'd need to take more images. The 300 f/2.8 is widely considered to be one of Canon's highest quality lenses, and from all the research I've done, takes the teleconverters very well with little image degredation at the aperture I'd be shooting for this.

I'm not expecting the visibility to be perfect by the way. 2 months too early for that. At best, I suspect it will be similar to how it was when I shot the 45GP, but I may get lucky.

I'd be very interested in people's thoughts as to what to attempt here. There is no other site in Dubai as good as this one for shooting a very large 360, and it will be gone forever once the crane is removed.

Quality? Or quantity?

What would you do?

(All this is just for the sheer hell of it - just me and my kit. No commercial purposes, no sponsorship, just little old me having some fun )

Regards,

Gerald.