I was able to go to the first game of the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs here in Tampa, where the Islanders beat the Lightning. Although I was sad at the result of the game, I was able to take a camera and get a rather large panorama out of it. You can see in the image, there are six Lightning players on the ice, but this wasn’t when they pulled the goalie, Ryan Callahan (#24) just shows up twice.

The camera was a 5Ds 50 megapixel camera with a 50mm f/1.8 lens, and I shot the panorama freehand, I shot freehand because Amalie Arena doesn’t allow fans to bring in tripods. I opened up to f/2.8 on the lens, focused on the primary television cameras, set to high speed shooting mode, and shot to get more than 50% overlap and to get the entire arena. I stitched the panorama together in Microsoft Image Composite Editor, which has yielded me good panorama results before when I’m quickly shooting a panorama freehand. The final panorama is 301.5 megapixels.

For web delivery, I took the full size TIF of the panorama, georeferenced it in ArcMap, sliced it up in TileMill, and created a Leaflet 1.0 map to view it. In ArcMap, I project my data frame to Web Mercator, bring in a bounding shapefile that is the four corners (-90S, -180W, 90N, 180E), bring in the panorama, and then use the georeferencing resize tool to maximize the panorama inside the bounding shapefile. I then save the georeferencing, and bring the panorama to TileMill, where I set the most zoomed in level to render at, and then export a tile package. I used Leaflet 1.0 because it has fractional zoom levels, and tools to slow down zooming to take advantage of the fractional zooms.