After the shoot

Plug your photos into the right software and you and your friends can explore the panorama you've created

Once you’ve captured your images and constructed your panorama you will want to show it off to the world, or at least publish it in a way that you and your friends can appreciate. So how do you do that? Owing to the fact that you’ll have been trying to eliminate stereoscopic effects, virtual reality headsets will work but they won’t give a truly immersive experience. Facebook and Google Maps are great platforms to show off your 360º image, though. To make the most of them, make sure your image is in a 2:1 ratio (600 x 3,000 is my preferred resolution); this will automatically be identified as it is uploaded to Facebook. Alternatively you can display your image on your own platform. There is a useful program called pano2VR by which to do this. Pano2VR will take your image and render it into a 3D sphere as well as offering you various editing options that are similar to PTGui panorama stitching software (see page 84). You can also create a webpage that can use QuickTime VR, HTML5 or Flash plugins.

lens, which means a total exposure time of just under 12 minutes, or 24 minutes with dark frames. Therefore photographing the rows first is important in some cases to avoid the stars shifting positions when you’re stitching the images together.

The practice

That’s the theory of panorama imaging taken care of; now it’s time to start talking about equipment. A tripod is essential and it’s important that you level off its legs perfectly, as any tilt on the horizon of images for a panorama has a very disorienting effect when you’re stitching them together. If you don’t want to invest in a panoramic head, good results can be achieved with a geared tripod head and a right-angled bracket. With these tools, the challenge is to minimise the movement of the objects in view: as you move your camera, objects at different distances will move different amounts. So compose your image without any objects in the

close foreground. Also use a large overlap and set your tripod as tall as possible. The picture above is an example of a panoramic image that I didn’t merge because, if you look closely, you can see that the stars are being repeated in different locations.

Panoramic heads, whether they’re manual or automatic, are designed to avoid parallax, an effect that’s similar to seeing the world in stereoscopic vision with a pair of human eyes. In the same way that objects seem to move in relation to each other as you move your head, by moving your camera it can ‘see around’ objects and won’t produce the same photo. To set up non-parallax imaging you need to find the nodal point of a lens. Finding the horizontal nodal point is quite simple. Set the camera so the autofocus is on the central focus point, then set up your panoramic head so that the camera is pointing straight down towards the central point of the tripod. Now adjust the camera so that the centre of the tripod is in the centre of the image. You should then be able to rotate the camera and not see the centre move off the focus point.

To set the vertical nodal point, place the camera so that strong window light enters the lens. Go to the front of the camera and look at the lens; you should see a bright spot. Move the camera using the vertical arm and the spot in the lens will move. Start adjusting the camera’s position on the vertical arm until the point of light in the lens is stationary, then set the camera to f/16 and hold the preview depth of field button and the point will become smaller. This will allow you to fine tune and check the horizontal axis. Bear in mind that if you are using a zoom lens the nodal point will change.

I hope this article has inspired you to try panoramic imaging and armed you with the knowledge you need. Due to the number of aspects involved, it’s a bit like learning to ride a bike and it’s not going to work every time at first. But once you’ve done a few times it will become much more intuitive.

Turn to our Image Processing section on page 84 to find out how to process your 360º image to create a seamless final panorama

Pano2VR provides a suite of editing features for your panoramic image

Covering all points of the compass lets you see your image in the same way as you would in real life, although the effect is lost in 2D

Movements and perspective changes during shooting will show up as stars appearing in multiple positions

You’ll need to set the camera’s horizontal (left) and vertical (above) nodal points before embarking on a panoramic imaging session