St. Peter's Basilica, Rome

This is the 6000x3000 px. panorama I shot in St. Peter's with the 5 Mpx. D70+10.5 Nikkor.

Handheld: no flash, no tripod, as the guardians and ideograms on the walls reminded everyone and everywhere.

I had read in one of the Panorama Tools digests a message from Jook Leung showing a panorama he had taken by putting the camera on top of his head and then turning around, becoming a kind of human tripod: something very handy when you do not have them with you, or you are not allowed to use them. Since then, I have shot many hundreds of panoramas this way. It may feel quite ridiculous, but you take your pictures (and of course you get an extra stitching work).

This one was not taken with the camera on top of my head anyway, but by tilting my body backwards, trying to avoid parallax as much as possible.

The late Hans Nyberg asked my permission to show it on his website panoramas.dk, where he had already shown another of my panoramas taken in Guernica ('Gernika' in Basque. It had been my contribution to Mickael Therer's site devoted to WW2). But as Easter 2005 was gone past, he kept it and showed it at Easter 2006. He told me that it was the first full spherical panorama ever taken in St. Peter's.

And it must be the one most people have seen from me.

Europe / Italy

Lat: 41° 54' 7.985" N
Long: 12° 27' 13.73" E

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: Medium. Nearby, but not to the last decimal.

D70+10.5, handheld, PTGui, Superrune plugin, PS