Dom Bower Photo Blog: 360 degree panorama

Monday, 8 November 2010

Here is the video and explanation on how to make 360 degree panoramic photos.

More details after the break

So the first image should be of an area that you want to expose for, don't shoot straight into the sun and at the same time don't shoot into a dark patch, keep the camera in a manual setting so that it doesn't automatically become darker when the sun is in the shot and brighter when you are shooting into the shade, the shot will just look messed up afterwards.

You can use a non-super wide angle lens but it will require you to take a lot lot more photos. I shot this with the Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 and on my nikon D300. I recommend shooting with the Nikon D7000
now as it has a much greater dynamic range.

One you have your setting (hopefully at iso 100 or 200 as well) you then go and start taking your photos. go in an ordered fashion usually in a clockwise direction (that is usually how the software imports the shots) once you have a full 360 amount of shots you may also want to shoot some more in a circular fashion where you have more of the ground in and also then more of the sky in.
For best effect you should use a panoramic tripod head

Using a panoramic tripod head means you don't have to worry about the issue of Parallax (best just google that one if you don't know what that means.

Above is another shot this time done by Kim. What you will notice is that you will end up having your shadows in the image as well, best use a clone stamp tool to remove that or just do it on a cloudy day, or hide in the shadow of something like a tree.

Once you have your shtos there are a couple of softwares you can use, photoshop, or PTgui (which is what i use) and then there is the free opensource software called Hugin that does the same things. My tests in the past have found that PTGui is the fastest and most acurate software I have used, much better than photoshop cs5 in both accuracy and speed.

There may be some spot missing in your image where you didn't get the chance to photograph, these will come up as black spots but can be easily filled in if you have used a repetitive foreground such as grass, sand, concrete, etc