It was a client commission for a series of cityscapes, each to be taken at a different time of day, that started Chris upon his panoramic work. The location was a 30th floor balcony in London’s Barbican and he felt that to do the stunning view justice, a panoramic technique was called for. The trouble was: he hadn't actually made any panoramas at that point.
Already a digital convert, he launched into digital stitching - a technique in which a number of separate shots of sections of a view are recombined to make a single, larger, wide-angled representation of it. As Chris explains:
"The first experiments were carried out both in Sussex and on the balcony itself. Despite a steep learning curve I was soon working the technology pretty hard as I quickly moved from stitching 4 and 5 images to stitching 40 or 50".
In the end it took him a couple of months to get to grips with the project but the results began to excite him:
"For one thing, so many component shots allow images that are both large (well over a metre in length) and minutely detailed. And for another, I found that the beautiful curved geometry that resulted from turning the camera through such a wide field of view rather echoed the dizzying feeling engendered by being physically so high in the first place. Together these two factors seemed go some way to meeting the view's demands.
Then, by edging still closer to the drop and including the full 360 degrees I managed to distill the vertiginous sensation still further. This also provided a counterpoint by showing not just the expansive view but also the length of the balcony - and even the inside of the flat itself".
"London from the Barbican: Pre-Dawn". May 2007.