What equipment do you need to take panoramas for virtual tours?
The Camera: To create high-quality panoramic images, you need a high-quality DSLR camera with interchangeable lenses and preferably with exposure bracketing. You need interchangeable lenses because using a fisheye or wide angle lens is almost essential to creating an effective and detailed panorama without having to take half a million individual images. Using a wide-angle or fisheye lens also means you’ll want to invest in a very high-megapixel camera. This is because a wide-angle lens bends light to fit more of the image in the same number of pixels. A low megapixel camera will not have a high enough resolution to be able to handle stretching around the edge of the fisheye image. I wouldn’t use a fisheye lens with a camera smaller than 16 megapixels and a wide angle lens with a camera smaller than 10 megapixels.
If your budget allows it, definitely go for a camera that features exposure bracketing, this will allow you to shoot High Dynamic Range (or HDR) images and is a fantastic tool for producing well-rounded exposure images for your virtual tours. High megapixels and exposure bracketing are features you’ll find on any pro-level DSLR camera. For entry level I highly recommend the Canon 60d, you can pick one up for around £600 and they produce fantastic images. If you’re willing to spend a little more, the Canon EOS 5D Mark ii remains my go-to choice for photography on the go any day of the week, bodies are available for under £2000.
The Lens: Opinions differ as to which type of lens produces the best results. Some virtual tour photographers use wide angle lenses, others prefer the full fisheye. Both have their merits: Wide-angle lenses create less pixel distortion around the edges of images and reduce the risk of pixelation within a panorama that can seriously harm the quality of your virtual tour. However, they require many more images to create a single panorama. This can greatly lengthen production and post-processing time and increase the chances that one or two of your images won’t stitch together correctly. Full fisheye lenses, on the other hand, only need a few images to create a complete panorama, the tradeoff is that they use the same number of pixels to take a much larger photo, therefore the images are smaller. quality. It seems to me that if you use a fisheye lens correctly, take photos that are well-focused, and pay attention to how your images look, then there’s nothing a fisheye can’t do better, easier, and in less time than a wide angle I highly recommend the Sigma 8mm autofocus which you can pick up for around £800.
The Tripod: Tripods are one of those things that hobbyist photographers almost always feel the need to get several times wrong before getting it right. You need to remember that your panoramic scene MUST be centered around the nodal point, your first concern is to make sure the camera doesn’t move a bit from the nodal position during shooting. Your enemies are the wind, accidentally hitting the tripod and having to change the position of the tripod head, all of this can be avoided by investing in some good sturdy equipment. You can buy tripod legs and ball head from Manfrotto for under £500. A ball head tripod head is particularly useful as you can easily level your Panohead through a full 360 degrees, even in difficult situations or rough ground. I recently shot a panoramic photograph of a 4-story sculpture from a beam nine feet in the air. The only way I was able to make the tripod stable was by supporting 2 legs on a wooden slat and the last one on the beam, the tripod was almost bent like an old man; without a ball head tripod, taking a panorama would have been impossible.
The Panohead: A Panohead is specialized equipment used to find the nodal (or parallax free) point. The nodal point is very important when taking panoramic images, as it allows each image to be taken from exactly the same perspective. If the perspective changes by even a few millimeters, objects will look a bit closer or farther apart, which means that when you stitch them together, you’re in big trouble. There are ways to approach this without investing in a tripod and pan head, for example the Philopod pitch shift method is very popular; however, if you want panoramas that you can be sure will stitch together correctly every time, a good tripod and panorama head are essential. Panoheads come in many shapes and sizes, from the inexpensive Panosaurous to the monstrous motorized auto-rotating VR head. After experimenting with several of these, I’ve found that there’s very little you can accomplish with Panoheads’ fully robotic baby T-800 Astala-vista super dooper that you can’t do with a tight midrange modular setup. Pick up a ninja nodal for an award-winning but refreshingly wallet-friendly £200.
With a good DSLR camera, the right lens, a sturdy tripod, and a stylish panorama head, you’ll be well on your way to creating beautiful panoramic images to use on a virtual tour.