Setting up the tripod

Capturing the images for a 360x180 panorama part 1

In this series of web pages, I have documented the process which I currently use to create 360x180 degree panoramas. This page, and the next two, detail how to set up the equipment and capture the images. This page deals with the use of a tripod, next there is the setup of the camera and finally taking the photos.

Setting up the tripod.

Can you shoot hand-held?

My first panoramas were all shot hand-held and although it was possible to stitch them in Hugin, the amount of work required was enormous and most of the images suffered from parallax (see below). The only successful 360x180 degree panorama that I made hand-held was of Exeter College front quad, for which I also used the 18-55 mm kit lens on my camera. The sky and some of the grass were cloned into place, leaving some obvious anomalies in the picture, in addition to the more obvious over-exposure of the image. Click here or on the image to see it in Flickr or here to see it in a panoramic viewer (which uses Flash). Aldo Hoeben of fieldofview.com and moderator of the Equirectangular group on Flickr was helpful with his encouragement and comments on this image.

Parallax is the apparent movement of an object when the observer moves. So, when I turned on the spot, my camera moved in a circle and the relative position of objects in the photo changed. A failed early attempt at a 360x180 degree panorama is my picture of Lemon Quay in Truro on GigaPan, which failed partly because of the bollards, lamp posts and buildings that apparently moved by different amounts as I rotated on the spot. More distant objects are affected less by parallax than closer ones, a fact that enables astronomers to use parallax caused as the earth orbits the sun to calculate the distance to relatively close stars, take a look at the article in Wikipedia if you are interested.

Will a normal tripod do?

During the summer holidays, I successfully shot several 360x180 degree panoramas using a regular photographic / home video tripod and an Opteka 6.5 mm "fish eye" lens. This was a big improvement on my initial method, but still took a lot of effort to stitch, there were quite a few parallax errors and I have several unprocessed shots, because I got fed up with the effort needed to process them. An example of a completed panorama is this image from the Pink Granite Coast in Brittany, near Ploumanach, which can also be viewed in the immersive flash-based viewer.

This page deals with the use of a tripod, next there is the setup of the camera and finally taking the photos.