Oleg Gaponyuk of Russia has won the major prize in the 2011 Epson International Pano Awards with a stitched aerial panorama of Kuala Lumpur city. Gaponyuk's image was shot while he was working on the Airpano Project, an effort by amateur photograpers to produce 3D high-resolution aerial panoramas of the world's most attractive cities and places.
“In 2009 I chartered a helicopter and in the early morning departed to
Kuala Lumpur to shoot several 3D spherical panoramas with the AirPano.ru
project. Coming closer to the downtown, I saw an amazing view… the
skyscrapers overlooked the city in the mist throwing fanciful shadows in
the beams of morning sun. Although traditional photo-shooting was not
in my plans, I couldn’t deny myself and quickly shot several panoramas
right on the fly. This panorama stitched from six shots. Shooting took
four seconds which allowed me to minimise the parallax affected by the
moving helicopter,” said Mr Gaponyuk.
Nineteen year old Christian Baeuchle from Germany won the Amateur competition. Christian started in photography when he was 15 years old. After experimenting in different genres his passion for fine art landscape photography, both in colour and black and white, started to grow.
“When I stood in front of that stunning waterfall, which rushed into
that natural pool, it was very difficult to capture due to the strong
wind which blew the spray directly to my lens. So I had to wait until
the wind changed direction. When that happened the cloud cover broke up
partially. The light in this moment was nearly magical. Now I was able
to capture the longed for single long exposures, which were stitched
together in Photomerge later. The result is one of my favourite images
of the whole trip through the west fjords of Iceland,” said Mr Baeuchle.
Professional and amateur photographers around the world were invited to enter The Epson International Pano Awards to compete for over $25,000 in cash and prizes. This competition is dedicated to the art of panoramic photography.
The competition, in its second year, was well supported with 3,586
entries from 985 photographers in 62 countries. For more information
visit www.thepanoawards.com.
Photo by Oleg Gaponyuk.
Photo by Christian Baeuchle.
