paris gigapixel 2019

I shot this image in the Autumn of 2018 on a beautiful sunny (lucky!) day. The image was shot in mid-morning, a couple hours after the Eiffel tower opened.

(By the way, the stairs up to to the first level of the Eiffel Tower aren't that long - it takes less than ten minutes, and it's very satisfying to get up there with your own legs - after that, you have to take an elevator the rest of the way to the very top)

Using a high-end dSLR camera with a variety of lenses, I shot a few thousand images from all four sides of the tower. I shot from both the lower and upper levels, although the images you see here are only from the top level.

After returning home, I had a hard disk (and a backup of course!) with a few thousand images. Now what? Well, this is where the real fun begins. As these images were shot by hand, not with a programmable robot, the photos were a bit haphazard and there were even a few holes here and there. Images from different focal lengths were used to fill in some of those holes as well as to make the sky. Multiple vantage points were stitched together and eventually merged into a totally spherical 360º image with around 200,000 x 100,000 pixels in size.