A photography expert has stitched together rare photos of Hiroshima to create a bigger picture of the damage following the atomic bombing of 1945, allowing viewers to zoom in and explore the site in high detail.
These images belong to the Hiroshima Peace Museum, but they have been edited to shed a new light on the devastating impact of the bomb. Jeffrey Martin, who has created "360 degree images of places that no longer exist, or that existed in a special way for a short time" on 360cities.net, explained to Wired.co.uk the process behind these views of Hiroshima. "I would have thought these images would be among the world's most well-known photographs. But part of the reason they're not is because the panorama they make is from individual photographs, not a scanning camera, which is how 360 degree images were usually made in that time. It has only been recently that these series of photographs could exist in their "ideal form" as a single, seamless 360 degree image."
Martin had to hunt down the original photographs in order to create the panorama, after he was shown low resolution online versions of the images. He says, "I literally begged the Hiroshima Peace Museum to send me the largest scans available of the source images so I could stitch them together."
The panoramas bring a new reality to the historic event, something that Martin has become aware of since founding 360cities: "The viewer feels part of the place which is portrayed. It's certainly not "as good as being there", but it is much closer to that original goal of photography -- to simulate and reproduce "the real world" for people who cannot see it themselves."
The advance of geolocation technology and Google Earth put images like these in a whole new context, and 360cities.net links to the contemporary views of Hiroshima where these images were taken. Martin recognises the link, "Google has made geography awesome and exciting for anyone with a computer and an internet connection. Since we've become a part of Google Earth, our own mission of bringing 360 degree photography to the mainstream has accelerated."
You can check out more panoramas at 360cities.net, as well as admiring the large-view shots of Hiroshima in our gallery below.