Alexandre Duret-Lutz

I'm a 29 year old computer scientist, preparing a Ph.D. thesis in model checking.

Photography started to become a hobby in the beginning of 2006, thanks to the flickr community. In September 2006 I discovered a stereographic projection in Sébastien Perez-Duarte's pictures and decided to give it a try. Since then I've been hooked. My first panoramas were all shot handheld, with a point-and-shoot camera that wasn't even able to look exposure (Sony DSC-T5). With its 36mm-equivalent lens I had to shoot over 50 pictures to cover the whole sphere. Stitching and color correcting such a panorama is not easy, but it is doable and very instructive. Today I'm using a tripod with a Manfrotto 303SPH panoramic head, Pentax K10D camera with a 27mm-equivalent lens (32 pictures to cover the whole sphere).

Technical Details

I work under GNU/Linux exclusively, using Autopano-sift, Hugin, Enblend, PTblender, and The Gimp to prepare the equirectangular panorama, and then using the Mathmap plugin for The Gimp to do the stereographic projection.