Thirty-six hours with London: the capital as you have never seen it before

A stunning new time-lapse video taken from the top of the dome of St Paul's shows 36 hours in the life of London as never seen before.

WATCH THE TIME-LAPSE VIDEO

Shot across a weekend at the beginning of July, the interactive, 360-degree video, which is made up of 8,000 individual panoramas, was captured by four cameras mounted on the Cathedral's Golden Gallery, 100 metres above the capital. 

The video is set to the Kyrie from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Missa in C major ‘Missa solemnis’ K337, sung by the St Paul’s Cathedral Choir.

The panorama is the work of specialist photographer Henry Stuart, who has already completed two previous projects from the Golden Gallery, a GigaPixel image and a Day Meets Night image.

But this new project, the first to involve moving images, took technical requirements to the next level. Henry mounted ffour Nikon D800 cameras around the Golden Gallery on specially constructed scaffolding rigs and hard-wired all of the cameras together with over 40m of power and trigger cables.

The resulting 8,000 images, shot over two sunsets and sunrises, give a totally unique perspective allowing the user to look around them as if they were on top of the dome itself. These time-lapse images are displayed online in HD at 4000x2000 pixels, with the full size video being 10,000x5,000 pixels. The rendering of the video took eight days.

Of his new project, Henry said: "I wanted to capture London's sunrise and sunset in the most spectacular, immersive, way possible, using cutting edge time-lapse and photography technology.

"Before I could think about how to do this I had to find the perfect location, and St Paul's is just that. Situated in the heart of the City it is surrounded by spectacular views in all directions - a stunning display of the very best of the old and the new of London."
 

Henry Stuart has been producing immersive, interactive, content since 2006. He has covered some of the worlds top events, including Wimbledon, the Ashes, the Royal Wedding, the Ryder Cup and much more. In 2012 he was the first ever dedicated 360 photographer to shoot the entire Olympic games. One of the 'giga-pixel' images shot at the games shows the 100m final in such high resolution you can zoom in and see Usain Bolt crossing the finish line or pan around to see everyone's face in the crowd.

In 2012 Henry founded Visualise to provide premium immersive content and technology to the digital industry. Visualise are able to provide a unique blend of 360 stills, video, CGI and giga-pixel with advanced social media integration, interface design and cross platform compatibility.

Visitors to St Paul's Cathedral can climb to the Golden Gallery, every Monday to Saturday.