Where: Salisbury Plain, UK

What: Stonehenge
Stonehenge captures the imagination, in part, because even today we don’t know why it was built, although there is no shortage of theories. Its axis is aligned with the sunrise of the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, June 21st; therefore it may have been used as some sort of calendar. (The midsummer sunrise lies very close to the axis between the Heel stone and the center of the circle, though since this alignment is not exact some dispute its significance.) The other promising theory is that it was built for religious worship, possibly involving sacrificial practices. A common misconception is that the Druids created it; however they arrived after construction began, although they did use and continue to use the site for religious practices. The stones were built by three different cultures, Windmill, First Wessex and the Beakers - so named because when they buried their dead they had their pots interred with them.

Perhaps what’s most remarkable about Stonehenge is that some of the stones (the smaller so-called 'bluestones' were transported from as far away as the Preseli Hills in West Wales, over 200 miles away! Construction took place in several phases over more than sixteen hundred years. Later builders occasionally reversed the results of previous efforts, sometimes reusing the fruit of their labor. What visitors see today are the substantial remnants of the last in a sequence of such monuments erected between circa 3000BC and 1600BC.

When: May 2004

Who: Photographer Ian Wood

Why: This is part of an art commission from Barclays Bank PLC to produce panoramic prints of Landmarks of Britain, which will be used in the offices, meeting rooms and corridors of their new headquarters - 1 Churchill Place in Canary Wharf.

How: Canon 10D, home-made panohead using a Manfrotto rotator and macro slide, shot in JPEG format and processed on a dual G5 with Photoshop and PTMac. Zoomify allows the user to pan in for hi-resolution.

This was actually the first panorama shot for the commission and is made up from 60x6MP shots to form an image nearly 19,000 pixels across and 6500 pixels high. It was printed 2400x844mm in size at 200ppi.

Related Articles:
- Ian Wood's QTVR2Movie software.
Email: ian[at]azurevision[dot]co[dot]uk