walking pictures

[Brian Cluff]

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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