José Ignacio Terán has been a 360Cities contributor since 2009. He has published nearly 1800 panoramas on our platform, many of which have been recognized as Editors’ Picks. As a result of his exceptional work and content quality, he holds the Maestro badge, an honor reserved for only a few. Take a look at José Ignacio’s profile page, you won’t regret it.
Over the past year, José Ignacio has been working on a 360º project of Oviedo Cathedral in Spain. You can enjoy all the panoramas published on 360Cities in this set: San Salvador Cathedral of Oviedo, Spain.
And here’s how José Ignacio describes the process:
“In May 2022, the project began with some conversations with the Dean of Oviedo Cathedral about creating two or three aerial videos through the interior of the Basilica Cathedral to be featured on their website. Since we had to fly the drone through the Cathedral square, obtaining permits became complicated as the State Aviation Safety Agency, the Ministry of the Interior, and other authorities could not agree. In March 2023, I finally obtained the permits and began the work of flying indoors.
To carry out this project, it was necessary to have the Cathedral closed and empty, which also complicated the process. Moreover, the shooting couldn’t be done at night because of the stained glass windows, they need to be appreciated during day-light time. Things kept getting more complicated and, as I flew on one day, I encountered new challenges for flights in other chapels and areas of the cathedral.
As I carried out the drone work, I came up with the idea of taking 360-degree spherical photos with the drone in the air, following a similar workflow to the 360-degree outdoor spherical photos I have on 360Cities. However, in the interior, things were more complex. It took me many hours to create a photo because the drone doesn’t have satellites, so the flight isn’t stationary. It moves randomly, and I nearly lost it on occasion. I had an accident when it collided with a column.
The work process to create the 360-degree images inside the Cathedral was as follows:
- I took off the drone, positioned it in the chosen location, and took 35 photos of 25 MPx, trying to keep the drone steady, which wasn’t always possible, so I often had to repeat this part of the work. These photos are the floor area.
- Once the drone landed, I used a regular camera to take photos of what the ceiling should be, the cathedral’s roof.
- Back in the office, on the computer, I processed the drone photos and the camera photos using Adobe Lightroom to match lighting, color, and other aspects and exported them as jpeg files.
- In Photoshop, I opened the ceiling photos without closing them to modify them as needed during stitching. The reason is that you can’t take aerial photos with the same focal length as the drone, so it’s all approximate.
- Using PTGui, I stitched the photos together, ensuring that the images captured with the camera overlapped perfectly with those from the drone. Since I had the ceiling photos open in Photoshop, I changed the scale and deformed the photos until they fit perfectly on the cathedral’s roof.
- As a detail, I can tell you that some photos took more than 5 hours of computer work, and others couldn’t be stitched, so I had to return to the cathedral and start the process from scratch. It’s not an automated process; it’s all manual, deforming photos, changing the scale, rotating them degree by degree is a tedious job, sometimes without a successful result.
In the end, the project consists of:
- 437 videos recorded with the drone, totaling 245 GB.
- 7 hours of recording during flights.
- 698 photos of 23 MPx.
- 420 hours of photo processing and video editing and rendering.
- 24 final videos in 4K resolution.
- 24 final videos in Full HD resolution.
- 150 flat photographs, some in high resolution, up to 250 MPx.
- 31 360-degree spherical photos, so far.
1 immersive Virtual Visit that can be viewed in 3D, hosted on Panoe.”
We’d like to extend our appreciation to José Ignacio for describing his experiences in detail and, at the same time, invite other creators to contact us to share some of their experiences with us and our community.