Barcelona gigapixel

360 panorama photo (2022)

by jeffrey martin

I shot this panorama early in the second decade of the twenty-first century (can you guess when? Maybe you can figure it out from the photo!). This gigapixel photo was shot from the top of Torre Agbar, which is kind of a pickle-shaped building (the locals have a less savory nicname for the building which will not be mentioned here). This building is a really strange construction, with the outer windows not being your normal sealed solid slabs of glass; each window is a bunch of flaps which can open or close. Inside those windows is a kind of one meter wide space which has a walkway on some floors, and inside that there are the windows to the actual rooms themselves. So the surface texture of this skyscraper is realy unusual compared to pretty much all other skyscrapers in the world, which are basically solid and uninterrupted slabs of glass from the ground to the roof. Moreover, there are lots of colored lights behind these window flaps, so the building is often lit with interesting colors. Overall, it's a pretty great building. As far as gigapixel photography goes, it is an absolutely great place to shoot from, with a perfect location in the middle of Barcelona to see a lot of interesting stuff. The Sagrada Familia is not far away and you can see a lot of details there. This image was shot in one day from around 6000 source images, using a high end camera with a very long lens, mounted on a special robotic camera mount which I programmed to shoot thousands of overlapping images. These images were then painstakingly stitched together, and joined into a full 360º image of tremendous resolution. Be sure to click the "fullscreen" button at the bottom right of the image. On mobile/tablet, long press one finger and then tap "fullscreen".