Where: Toronto, Canada

What: Toronto’s CN Tower, taken from the first (lower) observation level.

The CN Tower is Toronto’s number one tourist attraction and Canada’s most recognizable architectural landmark. It was completed in 1975 at a cost of $57 million and served the practical purpose of solving communication problems in the area – as a result, Toronto residents enjoy some of the clearest reception in North America.

click here to open Full Screen

The Tower was the tallest freestanding structure in the world, measuring 1815 feet, 5 inches, and is almost twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower and more than three times the height of the Washington Monument.

Six high-speed glass-fronted elevators whisk visitors to the top in 58 seconds to the observation level, where they can transfer to the Skypod elevator and transfer up another 33 floors, where the thick glass floor provides a vertigo-inducing view at 1122 feet straight down.

Who: Photographer David Gibson of www.etpanorama.com, where you can find many panoramas of Quebec’s Eastern Townships – an idyllic place with rolling hills, lakes and picturesque villages.

Why: David Gibson writes, “I was in Toronto visiting family for Easter Weekend and I wanted to take my wife and kids up the tower. It was purely a tourist motivation. As it turned out, two of the boys were invited to the Raptors game that day so they were in the Air Canada Centre right below us at the time I took this.”

How: “On the first observation level, the windows were bubble shaped enough to allow me get a reasonably good vertical fov by placing the lens right up to within a cm or so of the plastic. I took about nine shots by walking around the observation deck. So the "nodal point" must have been about 50 feet in diameter (I don't know exactly how wide the first observation level is). One problem was that on one side is a restaurant/bar and I had to politely ask the patrons to allow me to reach across their tables to take the shots. Another problem was that it was crowded and difficult to get a good spot at each window. A suggestion if you try this: bring along a small bottle of Windex. There were a lot of handprints on the windows. I managed to obtain a bit of detail from one down shot I took through the glass floor, but this only helped for about one quarter of the downward view.

The pano was taken with a Canon 300D and Sigma 8mm, iso 100, 1/40 f16. The RAW format was extracted using the Canon File Utility and vignetting correction was done using a homemade filter. Stitching was done with PTMac using 7 shots. Post-processing included the iAerial2taste action found in the iNovaFX_filters package from the Nikon eBook. This filter is useful for sharpening and removing haze from aerial photos.”
Email: dave[at]etpanorama[dot]com