The Empire of Schaerbeek Lights – Josaphat Park

Chromaluxe avec American Box
Dimensions photo : 240 x 87 cm
Dimensions hors tout: 245 x 92 cm
tirage # 3/8

The central third of a 1071 photos, 9 billion pixels, 210° panoramic view of Brussels, showing the Josaphat park in Schaerbeek, before sunset at the bottom, at dusk in the middle and during nighttime above (downsized for Flickr).

I shot the 1071 photos on a cold December day, starting with the bottom photos at 3:30 pm (before the 4:30 pm sunset), and ending with the top photos at 6:30 pm in dark night. This explains the progressive changes in the light.

I titled it ”The Empire of Schaerbeek Lights” as a tribute to René Magritte’s famous paintings ”L’Empire des Lumières” which depicts a paradoxical image of a nighttime street beneath a daytime sky – although here it’s just the opposite. Also, Magritte’s last house is visible on this pano – but just barely.

This pano was shot in 2011 from the top floor of the Brusilia Residence in Schaerbeek (Brussels), which then was the tallest residential building in Belgium. Its 1071 photos were shot using a Nikon D7000 with a 200mm f2 lens and an x1.4 teleconverter mounted on a GigaPan Epic Pro motorized head, and I stitched them with MS-ICE.

Since it was my first attempt to stitch so many photos, it took me over 3 weeks of hard work to manage to assemble them a first time.

It took me another 6 weeks of trial and error to properly process the individual photos and the resulting stitch with Photoshop to get to this result…