This is actually the name of a shopping mall, The Place, in the heart of Beijing’s Central Business District. It’s main feature is a huge LED screen covering the entire pedestrianized street. In fact, at 88 feet wide and over 2,000 feet long, the length of a city block, it is (or at least was when I shot it!) Asia’s largest. Called the Sky Screen, it has animated scenes, and at the time I was shooting this was an underwater view with colorful coral borders, and every so often a whale cruising through it, seen from beneath. All in all, quite an experience for even jaded Chinese shoppers at the high-end stores.
No ordinary wide-angle lens would take in the entire screen and surrounding buildings. A full fisheye would, but then the rectangular lines of the screen would be curved along with everything else. Stepping back was not a useful option either, as less of the overhead screen would be visible, and this, after all, was the point of the picture. The only solution was a stitched panorama with the camera panning on a sharply tilted axis. This way, I hoped to confine the real distortion to the surroundings, and leave the screen in a recognizable shape.
Then there was the matter of timing. This had to be when the balance of residual daylight in the sky and the mall lighting was matched about evenly. In fact, more of an issue as it turned out was when the screen was switched on, which looked like it would be later than I expected. The sky was clear and blue during the day, which promised well — dusk shots always have more clarity and richness under a clear sky than a cloudy one, which generally adds a flattening effect to the scene. I checked with the administration and though there was some vagueness, it seemed they would switch on shortly after 5:00 pm. This was November, and sunset was at 4:30, so the timing looked good. In the event, I began shooting at 5:20pm.
Technically, I used a 12mm focal length on a cropped-sensor Nikon DSLR, the equivalent of 18mm full frame, so fairly wide. Beginning with a framing that took in the entire screen and had it central in the frame, which meant a severe upwards tilt, I fixed the limits of the swing on either side to just over one entire frame’s width. For shooting the sequence in order to stitch it, this meant shooting seven frames with good overlap. In addition, to handle the contrast range, which was quite high because of the lights, I shot two frames for each view, spaced 2 ƒ-stops apart. I shot for 15 minutes, repeating the sequence several times for back-up, until the sky had gone dark, and completed almost 100 frames. The final sequence of 7 frames times 2 exposure variations = 14 images were processed in Photoshop’s Photomerge and Fotomatix’ Exposure Fusion. Some warping was applied to the final TIFF, and it was cropped to a rectangle.