About Catacombs 500 k
Underneath the streets of the French capital city, lays a mysterious network of dark tunnels and corridors. It's quite huge since the total length is above 300 km, with intersections every now and then, one can easily get lost. Originally, the place was digged to extract limestone for construction but this labyrinth is often named "Catacombs" because a small part of it received millions of skeletons from Paris cemeteries no longer in use (such as le Cimetierre des Innocents). Nobody really lives in the Catacombs, but there are more or less fanatic visitors, they call themselves "Cataphiles". The great challenge when you make pictures in such a place is to give enough light to be able to see something in the frame, but not too much to keep a minimum of mystery. Of course the challenge gets higher when it comes to shoot a pano at the crossroad of six corridors.We had to bring down kilos of flashlight and candles to enlight the scene and shoot quickly before the candles finished (otherwise the pictures wouldn't match together).The difficulties were increased by the fact that you can't really see anything around in the dim light and it doesn't help the focusing. Anyway, my friend and QTVR colleague Philippe Abeilhou and I (Fred Raynaud) managed to do this test pano down there, because the place as so much magic it deserves it and we have really big production projects for the Catacombs.