As we announced it a few weeks ago, we dedicate today an article to the new book of French photographer Bertrand Bodin: “Vauban, les sites majeurs”. This book comes after a first one released last year: “Briançon, Vauban et son empreinte”.

Vauban (1633-1707) was the most important military engineer of his age. He designed new types of fortifications and advised Louis XIV on how to make France’s borders safer and more defensible. Find out more about Vauban on Wikipedia.

This book has been ordered by the Vauban association, to support the candidature of the 14 major Vauban works to be listed as Unesco World Heritage sites. Bertrand Bodin had to work quickly: “It was an urgent order, since I only had 6 month to seal the project, including the publishing. If you consider that the 14 sites to be shot are located everywhere on the French territory, you can better estimate the challenge this project represented!” told Bertrand Bodin to journalist Nicolas Mériau (Image & Nature magazine n°13).

From a technical point of view, Bertrand Bodin used a Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II with a 16 million pixels sensor and a wide-angle lenses, like the EF 15mm f/2.8 fisheye. Many photos of the book are stitched images. The photographer used the program Autopano Pro to stitch the images: “This program is by far better than the others. I have been working for a long time with Stitcher and PTGui and I could make the difference. One of Autopano Pro’s strengths is to be able to create panoramic images from photos shot with different focal distances: a 15mm with a 24mm, a 20mm with a 35mm, etc. What’s more, it corrects very well fisheye distortions. And, despite its advanced functionalities, it remains very easy to use”.

To find out more about Bertrand Bodin, you can visit his website.

A 10-page article is dedicated to panoramic photography in the 34th issue of French magazine Declic Photo (nov. 2007), including 4 pages dedicated to photo stitching.

After listing the hardware that can be used in the professional panoramic photography, the article deals with the stitching process itself, and focuses on Autopano Pro:
“No need to beat around the bush, the best quality/simplicity/price ratio is hold by Autopano Pro, an amazing French software that automatically detects the photos to be stitched. (…) The advantage of a software like Autopano Pro is that he does not only stitches your images: it corrects the stitching defects, modifies the views’ exposure to make them homogenous, adapts the images tones, handles most of file formats, and can manage a large number of images to stitch.”

This article, written by Denis Boyard, is illustrated with panoramic photographs by Bertrand Bodin, to whom the magazine dedicates an interview:

“After having tested several perfectible solutions, I adopted the program Autopano Pro, developed by Alexandre Jenny, mathematician in Chambery (France). This software detects and stitches my photos with a stupefying speed and an incredible easiness, all this without any montage defect in most cases. While I used to need seven hours of work in Photoshop to stitch a panorama manually (it was the only available method when I started out), now it only takes me a few minutes to manage it! The whole thing does not need particular attention, since you only need a few clicks to perform a series of stitched images in an image folder. I can even launch a rendering and go and do something else when in the case of a very large format.”

Bertrand Bodin has just published his new book dedicated to the architectural work of Vauban, architect and urban planner of Louis XIV (Vauban les Sites Majeurs, available from Libris). The book is illustrated with numbers of panoramas by the photographer, and the texts are from Nicolas Faucherre, archeologist and historian. We will dedicate a further article to this book’s release.