Arsenal FC – Emirates Stadium Panorama

I had the pleasure of visiting the Emirates Stadium recently – quite wonderful piece of architecture that strangely seems to lack the blood curdling atmosphere of other stadiums i’ve been to. The sound seems to waft straight out of the top of the stadium. In contrast, the new Wembley, which I went to a few weeks after this, had much better acoustics.

Arsenal were pretty spectacular that day, humbling poor Derby by five goals. I’m not an Arsenal fan, I should say :) My heart belongs to Liverpool.

Post production notes: This is a panorama made up of 5 different images. Getting good panoramas is tricky. The key, for me, is getting the right manual exposure. I hold the camera up and take exposure readings across the range that I want to photograph, from left to right. Usually you get a range of readings back, as some shots will be darker than others. The trick is to set your camera to something roughly in the middle and then take all the shots at that exposure.

Then you need to download an amazing little application called autostitch which does all the hard work of melding the images together. It really is incredible how accurate it is – i’ve been trying to do good panoramas for years now, and autostitch is by far the most usefull tool i’ve come across. Once autostitch has worked it’s magic, I brought this image back into photoshop and cropped and straightened and did the usual saturation boosts and contrast adjustments.