Assembling Panoramic Photos: A Designer's Notebook

8.1. Stage 1

8.1.1. Method

The camera equipment I normally use is nothing special; it's closer to a dedicated amateur's gear than a professional photographer's. But when creating a spherical panoramic view, it's essential to use a reliable parallax head so the camera's lens entry point remains fixed. These days, four manufacturers make such heads: Manfrotto (303SPH), Kaidan (QuickPan III), Peace River (3Sixty), and Agno's (QuicklyQTcubic). I chose the Agno's, which isn't well known but is robust and accurate. It takes a while to get the hang of using it, but once mastered, the Agno's head is completely satisfactory.

The technique I used here was to shoot rows of photos, then overlap them to cover the entire sphere. The number of photographs required depends on the focal length used: the shorter the lens, the more shots you need.

The Canon EOS 300D's CCD sensor has a ratio of 1:6, and my 17mm lens is the equivalent of the 27.2mm lens found on a 35mm camera. Since Stitcher requires an overlap of about 30% between each photograph regardless of the focal length used, I would need to shoot a lot of pictures to complete the sphere—32, in fact.

I started by taking a series of 10 photographs at 90° from vertical (the camera was mounted in portrait mode), rotating the camera 36° after each shot. Then I took 10 more with the camera tilted down 45°, another 10 with the camera tilted up 45°, and finally one shot each of the zenith and the nadir.

Normally, the biggest difficulty is taking ...