I made this by standing in the corners and poking the camera through the holes in the protective wire mesh.
As you can see from this picture:
the place where you can take the pictures is a square space with a massive square pillar on each corner and three columns along each side. In cross-section it looks like this:
There is a fairly massive block in the middle, housing the lift and maintenance shafts.
The place is of course full of tourists milling around. I needed at least 8 photos, and rather in quick succession.
Because I was so high up and therefore objects were far away, it was not necessary to take all photos from a single point, rotating the camera around the focal point of the lens. Rather, it was fortunately possible to move quite a distance between photos.
I had to move to the tail positions of each of the eight arrows in the diagram:
This involved sqeezing through the crowds and hoping that the time it took was short enough that the lighting conditions would not change too much.
However, I could not stop the boats on the Canal Grande, so I had to do some work in PhotoShop to remove multiple boats :-)
There is some vignetting and I also could not get the horizon over the cathedral of St Mark right: I had to choose between overlapping cupolas of the cathedral or a double horizon. I chose the double horizon, and I bet you did not really notice.
The photos were taken with an Olympus E20P, 5 megapixel digital reflex, and stiched together using Apple Quicktime VR Studio.
