In August 2005 the VRWay team headed to Venice to attend the PanoTools meeting and to shoot a series of panoramas for Arounder Venice. While there, several members of the team took their first gondola tour through the canals, an experience so redolent of Venice that they wondered why they hadn’t done it on earlier visits. (In fact, while one would think this would be a high priority for most tourists, many of them find the gondolas too expensive.) This gave Marco Trezzini an idea: Why not do a VR tour through Venice by gondola!
It would be a technically difficult shoot, working within the confined space of the gondola and dealing with the undulating motion created by the water. It would require special techniques, both for the shots and the stitching. There were less than a handful of panographers who would be up for the challenge, but luckily one of them was in Venice at the time – Hans Nyberg. Trezzini approached Nyberg with the idea and kept his expectations in check; he would be happy with one or two useable panos; to his amazement, Nyberg’s shoot produced eight quality panos. It was not an easy assignment, although it was mitigated somewhat by the two lovely female passengers.
click here to view fullscreenNyberg recalls this assignment as “one of the hardest tasks I have ever done in VR photography”. He immediately realized it would be impossible to shoot handheld from the small and wobbly confines of the gondola, therefore he used a specially made tripod with a very small base and a monopod on top. “I had to be able to hide as close as possible to the tripod,” he explains. The images were shot with the camera pointed a couple degrees up so he wouldn’t need to take the zenith. To cover the nadir, he shot a couple images that could be used for all the panos. “I shot 10 - 18 images around for each pano, but of course they were not all used,” Nyberg recalls. “Some of them were shot with my automatic Canon remote timer, which can shoot one image per second. This made it easy to concentrate on rotating, which I did usually in six steps, shooting four to five images in the start position with the girls, and then another one to two images in each position, depending on the situation.”
Another problem was that the left-drive traffic rules require gondolas to hug their respective side of the canal, bringing the boats very close to the buildings, particularly on the most trafficked canals. “This makes it very difficult to stitch, even if you shoot very fast,” says Nyberg.
For instance, in this pano below, shot on one of the busiest canals, Nyberg shot 14 images in 14 seconds with an automatic timer:
click here to view fullscreen“A motorboat passed during the shoot and the waves from it moved the gondola in another angle from the buildings. The same happened when the gondolier tried keeping the gondola at the same place in some of the smaller canals where we were alone. Keeping it absolutely at the same place, even for a couple of seconds, was very difficult.” As a result, even the smallest sideways movement of the boat produced a bowed form that needed straightening in the stitch. Passing gondolas, which Nyberg discovered were much longer than he had expected, generated another problem: “The 114 degrees my Sigma 8mm covers horizontally was just enough, however to do that without looking through the viewfinder was very difficult. And one second moving forward changes the background. Extra Photoshop work was needed.”
We think Nyberg did a splendid job! You can view the results for yourself at Arounder Gondola.
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Shoot Details:
The images were shot at f5 or 5,6 and 1/200 - 1/400 sec. 200 ASA most of them in RAW but a couple of the panoramas were made with JPEG.
Stitching: PTMac exported as PSD layers and blended by hand in Photoshop
Camera: Canon 20D
Lens: Sigma 8mm Fisheye
Canon Remote control and timer TC-80N3
Panorama head: Nyberg’s own construction.
A very simple and light construction which, used together with the rotation unit Manfrotto 300N, gives me a perfect solution for batch stitching with a template with the Sigma 8mm. For rotating it from below the Manfrotto 300N is moved to the bottom of the monopod.
Manfrotto 682B Monopod
This monopod has a special construction at the bottom used for foldable legs. Nyberg modified it and replaced the legs with a standard camera thread that makes it possible to mount it at the top of any tripod.
Manfrotto 300N
Placed at the bottom of the monopod for easy rotating from below.
Used this way, Nyberg can easily take panoramas from a height of three meters with the small tripod you see here and with his big tripod he can reach four meters.
The tripod to the right is a Manfrotto TrayPod. (Unfortunately it seems to have gone out of production. A very stable tripod with two extensions that give it a height of 1,30 meters
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