In the Garden on the 39th floor of the Commerzbank-HQ

The location:

The headquarter of the Commerzbank AG is located in a skyscraper in Frankfurt/M. It's called Commerzbank Tower and was the tallest office-building in Europe until 2004. For recreation purposes and climatic reasons the architects of the building (Norman Foster and partners) designed nine gardens inside the building.

The nine gardens are spirally arranged, while reaching higher levels of the building. Three of the gardens face to the east/north-east, three to the south and three to the west/north-west. Each of the gardens is four floors high and - due to its's large window front - clearly visible from outside the building.

For the current WWP event I selected a viewpoint near the outer window of the garden on 39th floor, which faces to west/north-west. It provides a nice view over the Frankfurt skyline and it is the upmost garden in the building. It's vegetation is from the north american continent.

Making Of:

Due to the self-made nodal point adapter I had no parallax errors while stitching. But due to the sunny weather I had to manage a very wide exposure range. To avoid the creation of a true HDR panarama I used a filter with a gray gradient for the shots facing outside the building.

So I only had to shoot two additional images for the transition area from exterior to the interior. For the two transition areas I manually blended two images (one taken with the described filter, one taken without) to the resulting image. The two manipulated images were used in the normal blending process.

Europe / Germany

Lat: 50° 6' 39.72" N
Long: 8° 40' 27.86" E

Elevation: 110m

→ maps.google.com [EXT]

Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

Camera: Konica Minolta Dynax 7D
Lens: Sigma 3,5/18mm
Mounting: Tripod with self-made pano-head
Software: Panotools, PTGui, Autopano, Enblend, Photoshop CS 2, Pano2QTVR
Pictures: 14 pictures @ 6MP (every 30°, two additional pictures for transition at exterior to interior)