So this may be a little off topic on my particular project, but I went with George Downing to photograph Building 16 for the Virtual Tour. The idea is that by photographing the building using sets of panoramas we can utilise the platform we decided to use (YouVisit) and it’s native integration with Virtual Reality technology, and more specifically, Google Cardboard. Hopefully it will make the tour of the buildings more interesting than simply a linear click through of flat images.

I’ve never done panoramas before so it was a fun challenge, especially considering the highly varied lighting in parts of the building. For example windows are incredibly bright in a photograph of an otherwise well exposed room. We decided that since the windows aren’t really of interest, we could have them as overexposed and white.

I hadn’t spent much time in Building 16 apart from then though, so it was interesting to see the starkly different architecture that looked like something out a time machine gone horribly wrong. Overall it wasn’t particularly difficult, but really only took a bit of time for each panorama as we had to ensure we had full 360 degree coverage from each spot. Unfortunately we couldn’t get to the Level 1 Lecture Hall due to lectures being held in there every hour, and we had to wait for the main Auditorium on Level 5 to be clear of high school kids before we could fully photograph it.

The images came out really well though, and the 5D worked a treat, especially it being a full frame which made the wide angle a lot more pleasing than what I am used to with my cropped frame 60D. The real hard part is uploading the photographs as we shot in both RAW and a high quality JPEG, so that’s going to take about 8 hours to complete.