Friday, June 29, 2012

West Palm Beach 360 Degree Panorama

West Palm Beach 360 degree panorama, Copyright 2012 Robert Giordano

This is one of the first panoramas I've made with my new Nodal Ninja 3 panoramic head. For this shot, I used the Nodal Ninja to take 8 photos at 45 degree increments. The Nodal Ninja also allows you to position the camera to eliminate parallax.

I used Hugin to stitch the images together on my Macbook Pro. Hugin is free and very powerful but it has a little bit of a learning curve. There are numerous features I haven't even played with yet. After using Hugin, I ended up with a nice, wide, rectangular panorama.

Finally, I brought my "normal" panoramic image into Photoshop and used Polar Coordinates to create the image you see here. There are many tutorials on the web that explain how to do this, although I found some variation between them. At some point, I might do a complete tutorial of my own but I'm still figuring out some details and I don't like to teach something until I've mastered it myself. =)

Nikon D7000 with Nikkor 10.5mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. Exposure: f/8 8s ISO 400 x 8 images.
Manfrotto tripod. Fanotec Nodal Ninja 3 w/RD16 Rotator.

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