Newmarket Street

The panorama opens looking towards the junction of Market Street and Newmarket Street in Derry.

Market Street was once the location of Derry's Linen-Hall. The market in which the linen exported through the port of Derry was bought and sold.

In the mid-nineteenth century this amounted to more than a million yards of linen sold in the Linen-Hall each year. As the commercial development grew on either side of the mediaeval city walls, it gave rise to the only breach, in those walls that eventually became Newmarket Street. (The city walls themselves are the stone structure that can be seen if you rotate to look uphill. beyond Badger's pub.)

No longer the site of a market itself, Newmarket Street is now the thoroughfare that connects Derry's two main shopping centres - The Richmond Centre (in the distance) and Foyleside Shopping Centre immediately behind the camera.

A panorama taken from the other side of the Richmond Centre featured in the March 04 WWP event.

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Europe / UK-Northern Ireland

Lat: 54° 59' 42" N
Long: 8° 20' 6" W

Elevation: 30

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: Unknown / Undeclared.

Taken with a Minolta DImage 7 digital camera, with a 7.2-50.8 mm 2.8 lens at 7.2 (equivalent to 28mm). Mounted on a Kaidan Kiwi-L pano-head. Stitched with VRWorx 2.5.2

I originally intended to photograph my friend, the artist Julius Guzy, at his Market Stall, but he was not available on the day and the rest of that street market did not seem very photogenic.

So I moved to this location and stood with my tripod for almost an hour, while a lot of people walked back and forth, in front of and around the camera or stopped to ask me what I was doing.

Each time the traffic lights changed another wave of people or cars would pass in front of the camera.

This is a cylindrical VR composed from twenty four original images but on the day I took three times that number of photographs, so as to be able to select images where moving people were not cut in half on the edge of a frame.

When the images were assembled and stitched there were at first quite a few ghost figures that had to be replaced by the originals using photoshop.

There are also quite a few "twins" - people who created a doppleganger of themselves by moving quickly and showing up in more than one of the original frames. For example looking down the hill the three young women who cross the road and end up sitting on the window of one of the shops each manage to feature three times. The small boy wearing the gold-foil crown occurs twice once with his father and again by the entrance.

So the VR was made difficult by the moving people. It was also tricky because of the variability in the light from the bright light looking out into Market Street, to the heavy shadow at the front of the shopping centre.

Originally all frames were photographed at the same exposure (in order to avoid the banding effect in the final VR that occurs with the camera on auto-exposure). Then in Photoshop I altered the brightness and contrast of selected areas of the stitched image in order to bring up the shadow detail.