A Giant from New York
This past October we were given the opportunity to access the rooftop of the Peninsula Hotel in New York City at 55th & 5th Ave. In case you are not familiar with New York, the Peninsula Hotel is an highly exclusive building in an highly exclusive neighborhood in Manhattan. Any image above street level would be difficult to capture just due to gaining access, let alone an image from the roof. Not only that, but the Peninsula Hotel is not very tall, meaning any view would be in the skyline as opposed to looking over it. Although we can not yet discuss the reason as to why we were there, given all this we jumped at the chance and photograph a day|night backing from the roof taking full advantage of the entire 300° view.
The rooftop itself is shaped like an “U” with the widest portion (the bottom of the U) adjacent to 5th Ave and the flanks running parallel to 55th and 54th street. Given the width of 5th Ave side, it was decided that 3 shooting positions would be utilized, one at each corner and one in the center. For the view North and South, two additional shooting positions would be used. Between these five positions, approximately 120 plates for each the day and night panoramas where captured.
Back in studio, I spent approximately 25 hours aligning all corresponding plates, creating 12 different panoramas of various styles from each set of day and night plates, then manually stitched those panoramas in Photoshop to create each master for the day and night along with adding in a new sky and other editing. The resulting day|night backing has a resolution of 1.3 gigapixels with a file size of 95 GB and can be printed up to 40 x 280 feet.
Below shows a progression of the master being created from each individual pano.
