I made my own by mixing components from four different companies: I prefer to mount the spherical head on top of my existing ball head, as it makes it faster to level and align the spherical head. Spherical heads are readily available from Nodal Ninja (several choices designed from the ground-up for 360s), Really Right Stuff (RRS – more versatile, but generally heavier and not as convenient for 360s) and several others.įactors in choosing a spherical head are: capability to support, provide enough adjustment and clearance for your camera and lens, ease of use, versatility (can components be used as a one-axis head ?), compatibility with Arca systems, possibility to reverse the vertical component, size and weight. Separate degrees of rotation make it easy to shoot multiple rows. This is necessary because except for circular fish-eye lenses (8mm), you cannot capture 180 degrees vertical with a single row of shots, even with your camera mounted in vertical orientation – the normal way to work. Its main purpose is to make sure your lens rotates about its optical center (often referred to as nodal point, although this term is not technically correct) in two directions. To work on a tripod, you need a two-axis panoramic head, also called spherical head. They also require you to stop down a lot for depth of field, resulting in low shutter speeds even in daylight. Close subjects easily cause misalignments if you are not rotating exactly along the optical center. Unless you create the 360 from a flying platform (maybe more on that in a future post), you are going to have something at a camera distance less than your height. While it is quite practical to create normal multi-image panoramas by hand-holding, especially with distant subjects, this just does not work for 360s. 360 means that you are looping back on a sphere, so any alignment flaw will be visible. For making less demanding 360s, there are much easier solutions, from mobile phone apps to a devices such as the Ricoh Theta which creates a 360 in a single shot.Įven thought it is much smaller than a flat Gigapixel panorama,Ī 360 is actually more difficult to pull out successfully.
In this post, I am concerned only about making high-quality 360 degrees (horizontal) by 180 degrees (vertical) panoramas, which means besides high resolution and dynamic range, absolutely seamless stitches over the entire sphere.
A detailed tutorial would take several posts, so instead I’m going to try and explain just the finer points I’ve learned – information which doesn’t seem to have been shared by prominent practitioners of this genre. By the way, if you haven’t, be sure to check the latest ones from the Grand Canyon. I’ve been asked how I created my 360 spherical panoramas (360s).