!!!Golden Eagles fly to Moscow

By
members of the [AirPano Team|Geography/About/Consortium/AirPano,_Team] that is a member of the [global-geography Consortium|Geography/About/Consortium]. \\

31 December 2010

with kind permission of [AirPano|http://www.AirPano.com]

History of this panorama.

We have been dealing with panorama shooting for 6 years already. Over
this period, we have shot many interesting world cities: New York,
Amsterdam, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, Miami, Las Vegas, Rio de Janeiro,
Dubai, Los Angeles, etc. However, despite our greatest efforts, we
haven’t still managed to shoot Moscow — the city, where we live. The
thing is that flights over Moscow are prohibited, except for rescue and
police helicopters.

However, we found this opportunity in the Spring of 2010.

It all began with the military fly-past over Moscow.

In May, we managed to get on board of a helicopter, which flew over the
city during the military fly-past rehearsal dedicated to the 65th
Anniversary of the Great Victory. While following its route, the
helicopter flew over Red Square and we got a chance to do a unique
shooting session over the Kremlin.

Shooting conditions were extremely difficult: the helicopter flies over
Red Square in 5 seconds at 250 km/h; no one in the world has ever done a
spherical panorama shooting in such conditions per one flight over the
shooting point.

Although we had not enough time to arrange for new equipment, we
developed our shooting technique in order to get what we needed and
trained to shoot this way from a balcony imagining ourselves on the
board of a helicopter flying over Red Square. :)

Unfortunately shooting conditions in the helicopter cabin turned out to
be even more difficult than I had expected, and when we took off, I
decided to refuse an idea of shooting a spherical panorama in Moscow
over the Kremlin, since there was a high risk just to spoil it all. Even
now, when we learned how to do this, I’m not sure, whether we would have
managed to do what we wanted those days.

So when flying over Moscow, we decided to do just an ordinary
traditional shooting session. After all, and first of all, we are
photographers and then panoramers. :) Finally, one of the photos taken
by my workmate Sergey Semenov and showing the Golden Eagles flying over
Red Square attracted lots of interest of viewers and for about a month
was among top photos at Photosight.ru — one of the most popular Russian
photo resources.

Golden Eagles is flying above the Red Square, Moscow

However, when flying back from Moscow to the helicopter base, we had
some free time, and I decided to try the spherical panorama shooting
from the moving helicopter.

We made about two dozens of trials using various techniques and finally
managed to stitch one of the panoramas. Unfortunately, the weather was
cloudy, and the landscape we were flying over was not much interesting,
that’s why the panorama itself does not have any art value. However, in
technical terms, this panorama became our great success, and we’re proud
of these results. You may read a story about the shooting of this
panorama at our website here.


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[Panoramas of Golden Eagles fly to Moscow|Geography/Asia/Russia/Pictures/Panoramas_of_Golden_Eagles_fly_to_Moscow]

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