The Los Angeles Philharmonic, up close and personal

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The music world will be looking at Los Angeles this fall with the arrival of new music director Gustavo Dudamel. But, of course, Dudamel is not Dudamel without his musicians.

So for this week’s Fall Arts Preview, Los Angeles Times photographer Bryan Chan captured the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a 360-degree panoramic photo. To see the photo in full and to fully rotate it, click on the image above.

Chan explains how he produced the specialty photograph:

After doing a test run a week or so before at Walt Disney Concert Hall, we were confident it would work.

We were given 15 minutes during a rehearsal to do it. Since it is 360-degree photo, everyone not involved in the photo had to leave the room. This left me alone with 100 or so people watching me. One even joked ‘what’s it like having to shoot with so many watching?’ They were a great bunch. I tried to tell jokes and not make a fool of myself.

The panorama is made by shooting consecutive photos on a special tripod head. The panorama tripod head prevents parallax and pivots the lens exactly over the center of the tripod. Luckily the orchestra was sitting. I had to instruct everyone not to move and be ready for when it came time to shoot their section of the panorama.

The separate images are then ‘stitched’ or combined using software PTgui and then displayed using Pano2VR.

After the jump you can see some of the unstitched photos.