[Blue Sky, Dutch, EOS 5d mk ii, festival, Floriade, flowers, gardening , Limburg, Netherlands, public art, sculpture , Venlo, whimsy, World Wide Panorama, one feature, >500 views +views+art]

1. 8 th May 2013 View Count reached 500

1. 15th February 2013 View count reached 200

1. 5 th February 2013 Achieved its first feature in the group Dutch Touch

      Camera: Canon EOS 5d Mk ii   |   Lens: 16mm Zenitar M42 Fisheye lens mounted via an EOS adapter.

Puzzled by the perspective?
        –   Take a look at the Virtual reality version of this Photograph all will become clear.

This is a 360° panorama of a garden featuring earth sculptures by Sjer Jacobs in one of the exhibition gardens at Floriade-2012 – the international gardening festival, which was held near Venlo in the province of Limburg in the South East of The Netherlands.

Above this garden is the cable car that traversed the site of the Floriade-2012.

This HDR panoramic image was created from 27 separate shot (9 angles each with 3 exposure-bracketed shots) that were stitched and blended together using Hugin, which in turn invoked Nona, Enblend and Enfuse to combine the images and achieve the HDR effect.

The original Floriade international gardening festival was held in 1960. Floriade gardening festivals have been repeated each decade since then. The second one was in 1972 and they have been held every ten years from then. I visited Floriade 2012 in April and again in September 2012.

This garden and the earth sculptures that it features were designed by the artist Sjer Jacobs. He chose the painting “Lying around the water” as his starting point and created a garden that reflected the painting.

There are three great heads, an arm and a hand crafted out of soil. Moss and seedlings were planted in the earth sculptures to hold them together. The aim was that they would change and grow throughout the year of Floriade.

In an interview before Floriade opened Sjer Jacobs said: “It is a living piece of art created with nature. I’m fond of gardens and I often see gardens to which an art work is added in some way. Some works of art are just bought and some might be especially made for the garden. But for Floriade I didn’t want to make a garden with artworks in it, I wanted the art and nature to be as one.”

There is some explanation of his inspiration and his methods on his website. Obviously most of it is in Dutch, but, if you have the English-language option on, the captions to the images mostly include an English sentence or two.

I have three prints all created from the same panoramic view of this garden.

My Method
This high dynamic range (HDR) panorama was created from 27 separate images. The source images were shot on a Canon EOS 5d Mk ii, with a 16mm Zenitar Fisheye lens. These were stitched and blended together using Hugin, which in turn invoked Nona, Enblend and Enfuse to combine the images and achieve the HDR effect. The source photographs were shot hand held without the usual tripod. A simple plumb-line was used as a guide to keeping the camera in the correct position as the sequence was shot.

History of this Photograph on RedBubble

1. 15th February 2013 View count reached 200

1. 5 th February 2013 Achieved its first feature in the group Dutch Touch

1. 31th January 2013 View count reached 100

1. 10th January 2013 A Virtual reality version of this Photograph is now featured as part of the World Wide Panorama Project.

1. 3rd January 2013 uploaded to RedBubble
2. 1st January 2013 Stitched the 27 images to created the panorama
3. 7th September 2012 Source images photographed at Floriade in the Netherlands