New Year 2004 New York
New Years Eve 2003 Celebrations at Times Square

The New Year Celebration at Times Square New YORK is famous. People travel from far away for this event.

The panorama made last year by Jook Leung is also famous. Ranked among the top 10 during all 2003 at Google in searches for Times Square or New Years Eve. Now he has done it again.

I have seen many speculations in Forums about how a panorama like this is made. Some people are absolutely sure that it is made with a special camera which captures everything in one shot. I have also seen one saying that Jook used 6 cameras triggered simultaneously.

It is true that one shot cameras exists. But they do not at all produce the resolution which is needed for a fullscreen. You can also use rotating scanning cameras but they are very expensive as digital cameras. However if you make panoramas with a limited view vertically you can use a rotating panorama camera with film. They have been used for panoramic images for many years. And they can easy be converted to QTVR.

The week 3 panorama from the Lord of the Rings premiere in Wellington with 100.000 people in it is made with one of these rotating cameras.

However for action shots in very low light they are difficult to use. To make full cubic panoramas most of us use a fish eye lens with a digital SLR. The only ones manufactured today are the SIGMA 8 mm or a Russian Peleng. You need to take 4 - 8 images for a full spherical panorama.

Jook uses a NIKON 8 mm which was made in the 70's. It is very sharp also at full aperture f2,8, which makes it very usable for panoramas like the one from Times Square. See it here together with Jook.

The fisheye images are remapped to a spherical projection using the Photoshop Panotools Plugin and stitched usually using one of the 2 User Interfaces for panotools: PtGui (PC) or PTMac

Some of us just stitch the remapped images by hand in Photoshop.