A panorama of Bristol

Today I went to Stoke Park, on the outskirts of Bristol with the main intention of photographing Dower House. Once I was there I noticed there was a great view of much of east Bristol spread out beneath me. The lighting wasn’t great, but I decided to make a panorama anyhow. I’ll likely go back one day to re-shoot the images with more favourable lighting (morning).

Here is the result, ranging from Dower House on the extreme left, with the M32 in the foreground. Approximately from left to right, you can see the districts of Downend, Fishponds, Frenchay, Kingswood, Speedwell, St George, Barton Hill, Lawrence Hill, and a glimpse of the tall buildings in the centre. On the very far right you can see the BT tower on Purdown Hill in Lockleaze.

Click for a bigger version, and then zoom and scroll at will in your browser.

One day I might have to add an annotated version of this panorama that points out some of the distinctive buildings, but for now you’ll have to make do with viewing some of them on a map. My viewpoint was one of the two northernmost markers, and I faced roughly south.

[mappress mapid=”4″]

For those interested in how this image was made – I took 8 photos with a Mamiya RB67 on 120-format film – that’s a 6×7cm negative. I chose to use Kodak Ektar 100 film, which is said to be the highest-resolution colour negative film ever made – just what I need for a job like this.

Back at home, I processed the film myself using standard C-41 chemistry. I scanned each frame in on my Epson V500 flatbed at 4800dpi. With the digital scans in hand, I fed them through Hugin to align, blend, merge and stitch them. The end result was a 537-megapixel image over 1GB in size.

The version on this website has been resized down for sensible viewing in a browser, and is just 2.6% of the size of the original. The detail in the original has to be seen to be believed, but if you want to see it you’ll have to come to my house 🙂