Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

5.1. Stage 1

5.1.1. The basic principle

Before considering questions of aesthetics and graphics, you first need the right equipment to shoot such a picture correctly.

You must operate as if you were creating a classic panorama, with this exception: you must cover all angles of view, meaning 360° horizontally and 180° vertically, as if you were in the center of a sphere. In fact, the stitching software will later map the pictures on the equivalent of a sphere.

5.1.2. Equipment

The tripod you mount your camera on is essential to shooting a panorama correctly. You need a panoramic head that can pivot 360° around the nodal point, on two axes. As far as I know, there are only two pan heads on the market specifically suited to this kind of photography: the Kaidan Quickpan III with spherical bracket, and the Manfrotto 303SPH. Personally, I use a custommade pan head built by a handyman genius—my father.

Using a digital camera makes the job a lot easier. For one thing, it means you don't have to scan some 60 photographs for each panorama, which is a distinct savings in time and money. Nor do you have to make all the photos exactly the same size in pixels so that a program like Stitcher will accept them. Given the number of photographs needed, you can get very satisfactory quality with a midrange camera (3 megapixels) for pictures up to about 11 × 17 in. in size.