Re: walking pictures

>     There is no super cheap way to do spherical panoramas correctly, but
>     there are a ton of ways to do them.

>     Probably the cheapest way to do it is to get a panorama head for
>     your tripod and take a bunch of pictures of the room.  I really like
>     the nodal ninja for doing that.  It's inexpensive (compared to a lot
>     of the others) and it's well built:

>     http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/838674-REG/Nodal_Ninja_N3II_PKG_NN_MKII_Starter_Package.html

>     To use the nodal ninja you have to carefully align the camera's lens
>     so that when you spin it around the camera is rotated on it's focal
>     point.  That will be somewhere between the front of the camera and
>     the image sensor.
>     Then you just take a bunch of pictures that overlap about 30% to
>     50%. You probably take anywhere from 16 to 90 pictures per photo
>     sphere depending on how wide angle your lens is.

>     Then you just stitch all the images together in hugin.

>     There are automated versions of the tripod heads, and this is the
>     route I would go.  They offer the ability of just set how far apart
>     you want your images to be taken in degrees and then simple press a
>     button, leave the room and wait for it to take the pictures.  It
>     offers the cheapest and highest quality of all the panorama
>     techniques that I know of.  A very good example of the Gigapan.
>     With the smaller cameras you could get the cheapest model and it's
>     not all that much more expensive than the Nodal Ninja.

>     http://www.omegabrandess.com/products/Gigapan/600-0006

>     There are also a number of specialized camera's that range from a
>     couple of hundred bucks to thousands.  The cheapest one I know if is
>     the Ricoh Theta M15:
>     http://www.amazon.com/Ricoh-Theta-Degree-Spherical-Panorama/dp/B00OZCM71O
>     Many of the dedicated cameras, the Ricoh included use multiple
>     cameras to capture the image.  In wide open spaces that it's such a
>     big deal, but inside buildings having multiple cameras that don't
>     capture images from a single focal point will cause parallax
>     distortion, which causes ghosting and tearing in the picture.  The
>     ricoh only has 2 cameras so there will only be one place in the
>     image that will have the problem which will be in a big ring around
>     the whole image, top to bottom, so it might not be a bad camera for
>     real estate photos since you can plan where the problems will be.
>     When you get to higher end camera like the Panono which have 36
>     cameras that are further apart.  Indoor pictures will become
>     terrible with lots and lots of strange problems.  Outdoors, with
>     everything being much further away, the parallax distortion isn't a
>     huge problem and you are treated to great 108 Megapixel images.

>     https://www.panono.com/home

>     Finally there are specialized lenses.  but you'll probably have to
>     have a much more expensive camera and the panorama is fairly low
>     resolution because you are now spreading your camera's pixels around
>     360 degrees, but if you need to take quick high quality photos that
>     don't require stitching, these can do the trick, but they are
>     expensive.  Here's an example of one of those:

>     http://www.amazon.com/EyeSee-360-Panoramic-Photowarp-Videowarp/dp/B003VHZS9W

>     Hope that helps,
>     Brian Cluff

>     On 03/03/2016 06:53 AM, Michael wrote:

>         I go to google maps and go to a world view and plop the little
>         guy down
>         somewhere and often the street view that pops up is sometimes in the
>         middle of the wilderness. I asked hear about it before and was
>         told that
>         you can get a hat with a camera on it to do that. Well, I doubt
>         I can
>         afford that hat so how could I do something similar with a camera?

>         Specifically, what I want to do is do a virtual tour of a house
>         and of
>         it's property. Could someone help me?

>         --
>         :-)~MIKE~(-:

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