Thursday

PICTURE TAKEN ATTOP WORLD TALLEST BUILDING

What It Really Looks Like Atop the World’s Tallest Building

 In January, Dubai photog Gerald Donovan showed us  what the earth looks like from the pinnacle of the world’s tallest  building, thanks to a 360 degree panorama that was ‘shopped to remove  the Burj Khalifa itself. But today, Donovan released the original,  undoctored image—and it’s even better than the original.
 The reason  Donovan chose to doctor the original panorama, you see, was because the  pinnacle of the Burj is home to dozens of sensors and antennae, which  block the view of the ground. For example, there’s a lightning  conductor, multiple aircraft beacons, cameras, and dozens of other  sensors. There were also people blocking the view—like the head of  another photographer, Joseph Hutson.
 “So I then  manually shot around these objects, plus a set of images looking  vertically down around the pinnacle,” Donovan explains. He ultimately  stitched together 48 individual photographs, creating a haunting  panorama that was completely free of evidence of the Burj itself, except  for its spindle-like shadow. In this image, though, we get to see the  guts of what’s going on atop the pinnacle—which is far more interesting.  [Gerald Donovan]