The Color Camera.

To collect color data, we use a Canon/Kodak EOS D2000 digital camera. It has high resolution (1728x1152 pixels), accessibility to the raw CCD data, and FireWire communication. The lens in use is the Canon 14mm flat-field lens, chosen to acquire a wide field-of-view, considering that the camera's digital CCD is smaller than 35mm film.

During acquisition, we disable automatic exposure and focus, set the aperture at f/11 to get a depth-of-field from 0.5m to $\infty$, and set the exposure time as necessary to accommodate the aperture for the entire scene. The wide field of view of any panorama typically leads to very large differences in illumination, making a single exposure setting problematic. Currently, we use additional lighting to more evenly illuminate the panorama, but are working on acquiring high dynamic range images, as in [4].