Photo Credit: Roving Rube. Viewpoint: Times Square at 45th St., looking south; 1/31/02 5:41 PM.

Notes (Roving Rube): This is taken from the same viewpoint as the 1/29/02 NYCJPG, only looking the opposite way.

It is also composed of three separate shots, each taken with the camera held on its end to get a taller field of view. They were stitched together using Panavue ImageAssembler, which has more options than the Photomerge command (offered by PhotoShop Elements) used in its earlier counterpart.. The options include being able to being able to adjust for the angle at which the camera was held and the focal length of the lens.

The net result of taking pictures like this is you are able to simulate taking the picture from about 20 feet further back then you are and fit more into the image (compare with Alternate View), quite useful in NYC where you are usually already backed up as far as you can go, trying to fit the building into the viewfinder.

As explained in the excellent Complete Digital Photography (by Ben Long) that the Rube is currently reading (and from which he finally understands what "focal length" means, and that shooting at an upward angle distorts the picture, and that one can actually do things to help fix this), you could also get a wider field of view with less effort just by using a wide angle lens, but that it is difficult to find a good wide angle lens for digital cameras because of the small surface area of their media compared to film.

The Rube did buy a wide angle add-on for his camera some time ago but was so disgusted with the fish-eye distortion it introduced that he gave up on it.