Beginners Guide to Creating 360 Degree Panoramic Photos

Beginners Guide to Creating 360 Degree Panoramic Photos

The most important factor in panorama 360 is the stitching software used that helps to combine series of pictures or frame together. You can use any software, including Auto Pano for creating 360 degree picture.

Outdoor and Indoor Photography

For outdoor photos, you can simply stand in one place and take the picture, rotating around the camera, ensuring that there is enough overlap between pictures, so that the stitching software can identify how to connect the frames or dotted lines. The amount of photos one requires to rotate in 360 degree also relies on the lens used. The software should stitch many photos, creating a single large frame.

360-Degree-Panoramic-Photos

Avoid Fast-Moving Objects

Shifts in the background, such as vehicle driving fast, may confuse the software as you will have an image of a vehicle in more than one scene. Hence locations with little movement, such as nature or calm sea, or sunset are the easiest to create. You can make use of Photoshop to minimize the distortion.

Using the DSLRs for Taking Complete Panoramic Images

You can take 360 panoramic images with any sort of digital camera, though using DSLR would be the wiser choice. It is said that DSLRs perform better than the traditional and point-shoot cameras due to the speed of capturing pictures, ease of use, ability to use filters, and capacity to frame the scene perfectly via the view finder. DSLR digital cameras have better or improved picture quality in comparison to point and shoot digital cameras.

Using the Tripod with Pano-Head Indoors

For indoor photos, you can make use of a tripod with special feature, named Pano head. This attachment helps you to make sure that the camera rotates around affixed angle. You can stand in one position and swivel around, same as outdoor photos, but keep the object closer to the camera, so that software won’t take much time to combine the pictures along with matching background. Here, there is less chance of stitching error; due to the use of pano head and tripod, you can enhance the accuracy of the process.

Panoramic-Photos

Use the Special Lenses

You can also make use of special lens mirrors and motorized pano heads to take 360 degree pictures. Before investing on anything, first learn about the software and tool, so that you can get the most out of it.

Take minimum of 5 photos in portrait positions and at least 4 pictures at 90degree to one another and then the last one overhead to make sure that you have shot the entire ceiling or sky. Do not forget to use lens having 8mm width and if you aren’t using the same, you may have to capture couple of pictures to cover everything from a 360 degree angle.

Tips for Aligning the Photos

Once you have taken enough images, it’s time to align them with the horizon and the ground. To make the alignment perfect, tie a string around heavy item (or coin) and hang it from lens, ensuring that you’re capturing at the same level of angle around the axis. Having some people or object in the foreground would be good. Since you’re using 8mm lens, just the mountain picture looks empty.

Stitching Your Photos

Image stitching needs the best software to tune saturation, contrast, and exposure. Once you’ve stitched the photos, create 360 degree tour. Set your preferences, such as user interface options, logo, and watermarks that you would love to have in your 360 degree tour.

So, there you have it; a simple way to create 360 degree panoramic photos without breaking a sweat.

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guest-author

Author Bio – Alice Wu maintains an excellent photography site that gives great tips for photographers such as creating 360 panoramic images, and choosing the best photo editing programs.

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Disclaimer: The above is not a paid post. The author’s views do not necessarily reflect the views of  TheTechStorm.

Posted by | Posted at May 22, 2013 19:31 | Tags: , , ,
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