In photos: Take a high-res virtual stroll across the deserted Charles Bridge

In the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, 360-degree photography, a technique that sees thousands of photos joined together into a single, seamless, ultra-high resolution image, has become an increasingly popular way to keep our passion for travel alive.

One practitioner of the craft, gigapixel photographer Jeffrey Martin, has been shooting cityscapes and skylines around the world since 2004.

The photos require an entire day of shooting followed by 2-3 months of post-processing, during which thousands of photos are developed from raw files into an image and then aligned using image stitching software and rendered into one 100-gigabyte file.

The Prague-based photographer recently talked to us about the surreal experience of shooting an empty Old Town Square and Charles Bridge last month during the government restrictions on movement.

“To be fair you can go to Old Town on Sunday at 5:30 am in the summer and there’s not going to be very many people there. But to go at noon on any day of the week and see a max of eighteen people on Old Town was utterly strange,” says Martin.

Spotting just a lone kid riding his bicycle, he told us, “Top Hollywood movie directors would pay millions for a couple of hours of what we’ll never see again in our lifetime.”

Rather than feeling unsettled by the experience, Martin says shooting Prague’s star attraction devoid of tourists made it feel “just like a normal town square.”

Click the names of these historic sites to explore monuments photographed by Jeffrey Martin during the coronavirus pandemic (as well as a handful of Prague places he has photographed for 360 Cities).