Panorama 360 Photography

These are another style of picture I love doing. These are brilliat for the likes of your facebook page as they can be viewed on phones computer etc. They can bring your viewer into the centre of your picture where they can view the whole surrounding. These do involve taking a lot of pictures especially if you combine them with your HDR pictures to give you that extra vibrant look. So for these I recommend a decent memory card again with a fast transfer speed e.g.

Post processing can take up a lot of time, as you have to stitch the pictures together. For this I recommend PTGui, as with everything there is more than one program. I started with this software and have been given no reason to change it does everything I require.

The work flow I follow to create a panorama 360 would be. Take the required pictures remembering each one will be bracketed. Make sure the pictures overlap enough about 30% from one to the next. Take one up one middle one down and then rotate until you have a full 360 view. If you can imagine yourself at the centre of a globe and you want to make sure you cover every angle. Do not forget to take the sky and floor pictures too. Remember to adjust your pictures for the sun my best results where achieved on a slightly overcast day when the sun was shaded behind a cloud. You could possibly end up with 100 pictures for one panorama 360.

I would then bring the pictures into photomatix and individually merge each of the pictures together creating about 20 HDR images.

After this stage I would bring them into PTGui and stitch all the HDR images together to create one big picture.

Finally I bring the picture into photoshop where I would adjust what type of camera took the picture(Basically it’s a layer that has been modified and then you add your picture layer together)
This makes facebook automatically recognises it as a panorama 360 and allows it to be an interactive360 picture.
https://www.facebook.com/futurephotoltd/

If you don’t have facebook page or account but have created a website I created a subdomain and used wordpress to allow me to add the Ipanorama360 plug in.
Visit my interactive pano360 tour with Ipanorama360 http://www.pano360.futurephoto.co.uk Here you can view the panorama but also include small links within the panorama which direct you to another and so on, it is like and interactive tour and i find it works brilliant.

Don’t forget google local guides is a great place to showcase your work. The picture displayed at the start of this post has so far been viewed 100,000 times which I find incredible.