derelict hospital panos

Panos/Objects created with Pano2VR/Object2VR/Pano2QTVR. You are welcome to post your recent creations here.
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PanoFrank
Posts: 12
Joined: Fri Aug 21, 2009 11:15 pm
Location: Berlin, Germany

Hello,

I would like to present my new Website www.beelitz360.de.
It´s all about the ruins of the former "Beelitz Heilstätten", a complex of some 60 buildings on an
area of 200 ha. All the panos werde made using AutoPanoPro, Photoshop CS3 and Pano2VR.

The site is still work-in-progress, but alle the panos work fine. Some navigation between the
different panos is planned for the next update, also the missing panos (thumbnails in grey)

Hope you like them, it´s not the "all shiny and new" stuff :-)

regards
-Frank
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Peter Stephens
Posts: 295
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2008 12:32 pm
Location: Exeter, Devon, UK
Contact:

These photos are great !! I love looking at ruins like this. Some of the panos have great colours in them, this type of unatural HDR works well here.

Would be nice to see some shots outside?

Thanks for sharing,

Pete
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Peter Stephens
Posts: 295
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2008 12:32 pm
Location: Exeter, Devon, UK
Contact:

This is one of my faves - http://www.beelitz360.de/pano13.htm


Pete
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PanoFrank
Posts: 12
Joined: Fri Aug 21, 2009 11:15 pm
Location: Berlin, Germany

Pete:
nice to read that you like my panos. There are no panos from outside the buildings, yet.

But I´m going to Beelitz again on tuesday and I´ll make some outdoor shots.
Meanwhile, you could visit www.grages.net for outdoor photos of this location.

Please see Galerie > Marodes > ehem. Beelitz Heilstätten for a lot of inside and some outside photos

Best regards
-Frank
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Peter Stephens
Posts: 295
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2008 12:32 pm
Location: Exeter, Devon, UK
Contact:

Great stills !! Loved looking at them. There is something quite magical about photos of ruins, though it's quite sad too. I get mixed emotions when looking at photos like these. Looks like it could be a lovely building, someone needs to go in there and sort it all out. It's such a shame that buildings like this go to ruin.

Is this building in the middle of noware, or are there other buildings around?


Pete
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PanoFrank
Posts: 12
Joined: Fri Aug 21, 2009 11:15 pm
Location: Berlin, Germany

Hi Pete,

I´ve been to Beelitz on tuesday this week and I came back with 15 (!) new panoramas.
I also totally reworked the website giving a brief information to every pano if you hover
the mouse over a thumbnail in the "Panoramen" section - a big improvement over the old
menu structure, I think.

You are right, it is a bit sad to see these buildings getting more and more damaged by age and
vandalism. Some of the buildings are now closed to the public and locked, and the owner plans
to turn them into a museum (that was the last "rumor" I heard of). But the most of the buildings
are open to everyone, wether in good or bad intention...

The whole complex of the hospitals is some 500 acres big with about 60 buildings on it,
ranging from little huts, a butchery, kitchens to the big hospital buildings.

Have you seen the movie "Valkyrie"? The hospital scene was shot on location in one of the
closed-to-public buildings. I have some fotos of the movie set with some requisites I shot just
a week after the production team left the site :-)

Best regards
-Frank
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jobes
Posts: 87
Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 2:34 am
Contact:

really interesting place… good work :)
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k.ary.n
Gnome
Posts: 615
Joined: Wed Aug 15, 2007 1:02 pm

Nice site, great images. Good work!
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PanoFrank
Posts: 12
Joined: Fri Aug 21, 2009 11:15 pm
Location: Berlin, Germany

2009-12-12:
Big update: now I have 50 panoramic images online.

Some statistics ;-)
3,262 photos, 49 GB of RAW data, 50 GB of panoramic images, ca. 17,000 x 8,500 pixel each,
240 GB TIFF images, 850 GB of temporary data, ca. 300 hours of work (220 hours rendering the panos)

Simply mad...

-Frank
jennytainer
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Feb 23, 2010 1:01 pm

I really love the photos, it makes your website unique and lovable. You should update us for new items on your gallery. I hope to see more in my next visit on your website. Also, I hope to visit the real location someday and see the ruins myself. Indiana Open Heart Surgery
Last edited by jennytainer on Wed Mar 10, 2010 2:21 am, edited 3 times in total.
User avatar
PanoFrank
Posts: 12
Joined: Fri Aug 21, 2009 11:15 pm
Location: Berlin, Germany

jennytainer:
There will be updates, maybe in late spring. There are still some closed-to-public buildings I haven´t visited, yet.
The owner of the complex is trying to give less permissions to enter some of the buildings because
the site is a bit overrun.

I´ll drop a note in this thread as soon as I updated my page.

-Frank
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PanoFrank
Posts: 12
Joined: Fri Aug 21, 2009 11:15 pm
Location: Berlin, Germany

In the first half of the year, I had little time to do any panoramic photography so there are no new panoramas on this website, yet. Another problem is that the owner has meanwhile forbidden any access to the area due to vandalism and unauthorized access...I´m trying to get a special approval but it may take some time. I decided to show some still photos of the buildings (interior and exterior views) with some extra information - sorry, in german only.

The "Fotos" (photos) section is work-in-progress, you may not be able to navigate to every thumbnail shown and there might be some "lose ends" here and there but in the end there will be some 120 photos with additional information.

-Frank
burgor57
Posts: 22
Joined: Mon Aug 16, 2010 6:47 pm
Contact:

Absolutely wonderful work. I have seen great still urbex photos and your work is up there with the very best of them. I have never seen 360 panos of this subject before and it works really well - perfect in fact. Your skills at it are excellent. I am a novice at 360 panoramas. I have done large format hi-def still stitched images and HDR photography, and am now getting into 360 spherical panaoramas using AutoPano Pro 2 (or AutoPano Giga) and Pano2VR. I love your flash skin you used. Did you create that yourself (I expect you did).
Can you help with advice on how to get the best results for 360 spherical panos? I currently use a Nikon D700, and I have a Nikon 14-24mm lens, 24-70mm lens, 105mm lens and a 70-300mm lens. What lens do you tend to use for your internal urbex panos? I have been trying with the 14-24mm lens at 14mm, having to take two passes plus a zenith and nadir shot. I found AutoPano Pro often has great difficulty patching in the zenith shot and sometimes the nadir. Especially where there is just sky or bland features. What is your advice to get those seemless images?

I assume - to get the high level of zoom detail you have to be using a telephoto lens of some length and taking many component photos? Can you let me know your workflow - it would help? I aspire to create high quality panos like yours. I appreciate any help/advice you can offer.

Your website looks very cool too by the way.
I am a large format fine art printer and if I can help you in anyway let me know.
Thanks
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PanoFrank
Posts: 12
Joined: Fri Aug 21, 2009 11:15 pm
Location: Berlin, Germany

Thank you for the kudos!

I am using Autopano Pro, too. In my opinion one of the best stitchers on the market. In most cases, no fine-tuning is necessary after preview - e. g. straightening verticals. Thats very important if you have to process 10-15 panos at a time...
The skins I used for the flash files are all self-made.

All my panos were shot using a Nikon D200 and a Sigma 12-24 mm lens (In January, I upgraded to a Nikon D700 and the fantastic Nikkor 14-24mm lens - but I haven´t used this combination for panoramic images, yet). I´m using a Manfrotto 303 SPH panoramic head set to 15 images for a 360-degree-shot. I usually set the focal lenght to 15 mm (equals ~ 22 mm on the D700). This grants that the overlap of the pictures is big enough. I prefer to have some more overlap, because sometimes the surfaces of the rooms have little detail or are weak in contrast which is difficult for the software to find anchor points for stitching.

I normally use aperture 8, maybe more if I need more depth of field. After placing the tripod, I usually do a complete 360 degree spin without taking photos, just looking for problems with overlap areas, looking for the best exposure time. This also helps the tripod to come to a more stable position. After the test round, I control the set-up of the panoramic head again and do some fine tuning with a spirit level. This really is the most important thing - be as fastidious as possible during the set-up.

If the set-up is all fine, I start taking the photos using a remote trigger to minimize the movement of the set-up and prevent shake. First, I do a complete horizontal 360 degrees (15 Images in my workflow, either single shots or bracketed shots with different exposures, if HDR is needed). Then, I tilt the camera upwards circa 45 degrees and do a second full circle (the overlap usually is big enough that a zenith shot is obsolete - except for very high rooms...)
Last, but not least, the third set of photos is taken with the camera tilted down 45 degrees. (Talking about the nadir later)

So you see - to tele lens is needed, unless you want a really huge panorama. With my workflow, the resulting panoramas are some 18.000 x 9000 pixel big, big enough to have a nice level of detail, but small enough to be stitchable even with 32 bit software. (I use 64 bit Windows 7 with 64 bit Autopano Pro and 64 bit Pano2VR but 32 bit PhotoShop CS3).

In most cases, I don´t take an extra nadir shot. Indoors, it´s to dark to take a free-hand picture and I do not want to take a second tripod with me for that nadir-shot only. So what you get after stitching the pano is a more-or-less circular remain of the panoramic head and the legs of the tripod in the nadir area of the pano. You can easyly extract the bottom view of the pano with Pano2VR and retouch the nadir in Photoshop. That can be quite tricky depending on the complexity of the floor, but in 90% of my panos, that works fine.

As you can see - there is no "magic" in my workflow - just a lot of try-and-error and a lot of practice ;-) Hope it helped. If you have additional questions, please ask. I hope that I can upload the rest of the still photos soon, unfortunately I´m a bit short in time this week.

Best regards,
-Frank
burgor57
Posts: 22
Joined: Mon Aug 16, 2010 6:47 pm
Contact:

Frank - thanks for the details workflow. I appreciate that. I understand all you said.
Are you familiar with the work of Jerremy Gibbs? He's a friend also into urbex photography. See his flickr page here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/romanywg/ I think you'd like his stuff. I am a fine art printer and have done large prints of work of his and others for an exhibition he is planning.
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