thanks guys; first off the placement of the chair was very unnatural - I wanted some additional height, so I place it at the bottom of the stairs.
The image was taken on the floor with a 8mm (180 FOV) sigma lens. I then took this image into Photoshop and added blackspace around it, 700 pxs either side. I did this because the next part of the process chops a lot of the image away. I used a free ps plugin called panotools to defish. You can only defish to a max of 179 degrees because of some foolish patent which means only 1 company can produce a tool to correctly defish and they chose not to share this *idea* - mad mad world.
I like this one more so than the color one. It reminds me of that old TV show, Land of the Giants (or some thing like that). It is a very cool image. Can you comment on how you did it? Thanks! -Earl Waud