Which lens for 360 panoramic pictures?

fatphotographer

fatphotographer

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Gary
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Hi,

I am looking to produce 360 panoramic pictures quickly at events. I see that most people use wide angle and fisheyes with just a few shots, some use longer lenses and take a couple of rotations with the lens pointed up and then down, and then there are the massive gigapixel images with longer lenses again.

My question is - other than the obvious increase in file size and resolution, does the final image look any different in the final rendering, when you compare a rendering from a wide lens with a few pictures compared to a rendering that used a longer lens which uses more shots? Is rendering an image onto the inside of a sphere the same, regardless of the length of lens? Or does the distortion of a fisheye / wide angle transfer into the rendering and then look different to a rendering of a long lens with the different perspective?

Thanks in advance

Gary
 
Quote " I am looking to produce 360 panoramic pictures quickly at events" unquote

To do pano shots you can't do "quickly" properly and I would not even attempt to do at an event. First of all you need a tripod with a head marked off with 360 degree markings. Then you need to overlap by about a third with each shot. You will need to lock off the camera settings so you don't get a variation in colour/light from frame to frame or else a distinctive line will show up in the final production. The number of frames depends on the lens as well.
As for lens choice that would depend on where you are shooting, for example a room shoot is far different from a landscape one, so no one would be able to give advice.
Your editing program will have to be able to stitch all frames automatically which will take time. The size of the final pano picture would be so large I doubt if it could even be printed without sever editing reduction anyway.

Just a thought

if doing it for a client have you given any thought to doing video instead? that way a client can be given the memory card with the shoot. To me it seems a far better idea as you don't have to waste any time in the presentation/editing etc,they get moving pictures and if they take the memory card to a professional company they should be able to produce pano shots off it.

below partial pano from about 8 frames single layer covering around 90 degrees or thereabouts. its been reduced several times to post on here

74jw.jpg
 
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Thanks for the input. I am happy that I can work quickly enough to get the images together early in the day, and then leave the staff to process and render the images during the event whilst I am busy elsewhere. I appreciate your response, I don't want to invest £500-800 in the kit and software only to find that stitching 4-6 16mm fish-eye images makes a complete hack of it and looks totally different than "doing it properly", and it can only be done with 20-30 50mm images which makes the whole process too long winded and unfeasible. Do you have any experience in the difference in using different focal lengths that you could share with me please?
 
I have never done a pano of an 'event'. I have seen some very good examples which I envy.
I have done mainly static panos.
I think the risk of people moving and ghosting between shots would increase the longer the focal length of the lens (and hence the more photos).

I have seen panos with lots of people in using wideangle lenses (8mm) on a crop body. 3 or 4 around, 1 nadir and 1 zenith (if required)
 
I agree with all the points made so far, and that is the reason that I want to keep the amount of shots / work to a minimum.

I have the full frame bodies, 14-24, 16mm fisheye, 24-120 and 50mm which will all be suitable, but I need to know if there is a difference between the final rendering of 4x fisheye shots and over 30x 50mm shots.
 
Different focal lengths will show up I suspect which is one of the reasons I said you need to lock off your camera on one setting. The photo above has been drastically reduced from 36MP to put on here. If you consider 85mm to be the same of an eye on a full frame camera or 50 mm on other cameras you would be about right. By using a prime lens focal lengths arn't a problem which I would only use anyway for panos.
If you use telephot lens and alter the mm it would throw out DOF and make a nonsense of the pano.
The photo I posted above using fixed mm gives a true idea of the scene. If I had zoomed in on the picture centre the whole image would look silly

Fisheye lenses tend to make the photo sides slope so I would not even consider too wide a lens.

You say 30x50mm frames at a guess, this depends on distance and trial and error. You also need to consider what size the final pano picture will be.

Your biggest problem will be light variation, thats what I found anyway apart from accurate overlapping. pano shooting creates interesting problems which need looking at. As John says people moving would be another one and possibly cropping them out of each frame first before overlapping may need to be done. Timing of each shot without people in frame(at least on the side of the picture easier to remove) would be ideal.

My first attempt at pano shooting in all honesty was terrible to say the least, light variation- altering distance with telephoto lens-not having frames level for stitching- camera settings not locked off to name but a few.

Not much help I know but I suspect the above is why not many photographers work in this medium shooting pano's
 
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realspeed said:
Fisheye lenses tend to make the photo sides slope so I would not even consider too wide a lens.
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This is the sort of thing I am looking to research.
I understand that the focal length and exposure will need to be the same for all of the shots, but I didn't know if a fisheye pano looked different to a gigapan pano when viewed at the same size in a window - knowing that the gigapan took much longer to produce and has a much higher (wasted for my needs) resolution.

Back to the original question, is there a difference in appearance between a 360 panorama which used a wide angle to produce it, against a panorama which used a longer lens with more pictures to cover the same area?
 
Back to the original question, is there a difference in appearance between a 360 panorama which used a wide angle to produce it, against a panorama which used a longer lens with more pictures to cover the same area?

I don't know as I have only ever used fisheye lenses. But, as the image is projected onto the inside of a sphere (for 360's) I would have thought the only difference would be the resolution.

At what level this becomes unacceptable is up to you or your client.
 
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john-oh said:
I don't know as I have only ever used fisheye lenses. But, as the image is projected onto the inside of a sphere (for 360's) I would have thought the only difference would be the resolution.
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This was my point. The inside of a sphere is spherical. Realspeed has indicated that he doesn't use fisheyes because of distortion when rendering the pano, and yet multiple "flatter" / "longer" images are then still effectively "projected" onto the inside of a sphere which distorts the image spherically.

Differing opinions, and both of you use different techniques. You use (and I presume are happy with) a fisheye, and yet another photographer claims it is unacceptable due to the level of distortion - I hope you can see my point, and the reason for asking.
 
I would ask the question here - http://www.panoguide.com/

The above forum is attended by folk who have in depth knowledge of panoramas.

I've stopped asking questions there because, often, I don't understand the answers !
 
Thanks guys,

I have been looking around and seen loads of really good work as well. I just hear conflicting info, and want to clarify things before taking the plunge. I reckon a few fisheye shots should cover it. This guy http://www.johnhpanos.com/sphericl.htm also uses the 8-15 Canon, but he uses it at 15mm.

8mm. 15mm, 16mm, 35mm ??? Is the final product the same?

I will check some specialist forums, thanks for you time
 
You're going to distort the hell out of it when you stick it all together anyway - look at any of those virtual tour photos online, the nature of them means the edges stretch as you move around; so I would just use a fisheye unless you want super high res "gigapan" style images. I'd much rather spin around and take 6 photos at an event, than 50 or 60.
 
fatphotographer said:
Back to the original question, is there a difference in appearance between a 360 panorama which used a wide angle to produce it, against a panorama which used a longer lens with more pictures to cover the same area?
Click to expand...
One obvious difference is depth of field. The wider the lens, the greater the DOF, other things being equal.

Another difference is that, using a fisheye lens, the resolution is a bit variable. I'm finding this a bit hard to explain so please bear with me. A fisheye gives you a 180° field of view, so imagine dividing that view into three 60° segments. The characteristic distortion of the fisheye means that the central segment gets more pixels than the other two. So some parts of your final image will be taken from the central portions of the source images and they'll be higher resolution; but some parts of the final image will be taken from the stitched edges of the source images and they'll be lower resolution. This might or might not matter, depending on what you're doing with the final output.
 
Instead of agonising over the choice of lens, why not use a Pano Pro? I'd have thought a one-shot solution would be ideal in situations where you need to set up quickly.

http://www.pano-pro.com
 
fatphotographer said:
Thanks guys,

I have been looking around and seen loads of really good work as well. I just hear conflicting info, and want to clarify things before taking the plunge. I reckon a few fisheye shots should cover it. This guy http://www.johnhpanos.com/sphericl.htm also uses the 8-15 Canon, but he uses it at 15mm.

8mm. 15mm, 16mm, 35mm ??? Is the final product the same?

I will check some specialist forums, thanks for you time
Click to expand...


I believe John Houghton has used a multiplicity of cameras and lenses, originally a 40D and a 8mm siggy, he is a regular on the forum mentioned earlier, and in my eyes, an expert in all things pano especially PTGUI.
 
realspeed said:
Different focal lengths will show up I suspect which is one of the reasons I said you need to lock off your camera on one setting. The photo above has been drastically reduced from 36MP to put on here. If you consider 85mm to be the same of an eye on a full frame camera or 50 mm on other cameras you would be about right. By using a prime lens focal lengths arn't a problem which I would only use anyway for panos.
If you use telephot lens and alter the mm it would throw out DOF and make a nonsense of the pano....
Click to expand...
Erm, isn't the focal length equivelent to the eye actually 50mm on full frame and 35mm on crop.

OP I would look to shoot at 35mm. It's what I usually shoot at. It means you shouldn't have too much issue with distortion and can cover a large amount of ground in a short space of time.
 
The chap I bought my fisheye from is a pro specialising in 360° shots and he uses fisheyes to achieve them. Can't remember the software he uses to stitch them or his website address. Personally, I use one of my Fuji compacts to shoot panoramas and have a few of assorted angled ones on the wall at 24" wide. About 5 seconds to take and the camera does all the stitching for me. Some of them show a little banding as the exposure changes while others are all but seamless.
 
If you have a scanner available how about 1 of these.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/spinner-360-degrees-panoramic-camera/dp/B003T5BY6W
http://www.ephotozine.com/article/spinner-360-film-panoramic-camera-vs-digital-panoramic-17127

Or most decent compacts offer a panoramic facility, most of Sony camera range do.

Personally to achieve the best panoramic shots with your DSLR is not to use a fisheye or wide angle lens but just use a standard zoom / prime at say 35mm and take a series of images in raw keeping the setting the same for each shot then stitching them together using one of the photo stitch software. If memory serves, canon provide one free as part of there software with the camera.

At the end of the day it depends what you are trying to achieve with this panoramic shot
 
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Nod said:
... Personally, I use one of my Fuji compacts to shoot panoramas and have a few of assorted angled ones on the wall at 24" wide. About 5 seconds to take and the camera does all the stitching for me. Some of them show a little banding as the exposure changes while others are all but seamless.
Click to expand...

pete.rush said:
If you have a scanner available how about 1 of these.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/spinner-360-degrees-panoramic-camera/dp/B003T5BY6W
http://www.ephotozine.com/article/spinner-360-film-panoramic-camera-vs-digital-panoramic-17127

Or most decent compacts offer a panoramic facility, most of Sony camera range do.

Personally to achieve the best panoramic shots with your DSLR is not to use a fisheye or wide angle lens but just use a standard zoom / prime at say 35mm and take a series of images in raw keeping the setting the same for each shot then stitching them together using one of the photo stitch software. If memory serves, canon provide one free as part of there software with the camera.

At the end of the day it depends what you are trying to achieve with this panoramic shot
Click to expand...

Don't think any of these are very relevant for 360º panoramas though.
 
Jayst84 said:
Don't think any of these are very relevant for 360º panoramas though.
Click to expand...

The lomo 360 spinner is specifically designed for the purpose, problem is that it's a film camera, so processing might be a problem.
 
Hi
Choice of lens depends on the type of shoot and also how much you (eventually) want to zoom into the image. I use a 16mm fisheye on a Nikon D800 and take 9 photos per shoot, 6 around, 1 zenith and 2 nadir. Sometimes I use my 14-24mm and obviously this gives me more resolution but almost double the pictures. If there's going to be lots of movement, crowds for instance, then the least shots the better. Stitching the final result is a task to be learned by trial end error but if you have someone doing this for you then that's easier for you.
Depending on camera choice, if it's a DSLR, then I would recommend a Ninja Ultimate M1 L, but there is lots of other options for smaller cameras.
I'm no expert but if I can help you with any questions just fire away.
JohnyT
 
I've done a few 360 panos.......

1. Gigapans are lovely and the quality is incredible. But they can take a while. It's possible to run through an entire set of batteries on one pano. Also, stitching can bring your computer to its knees.

2. If you really want to do these fast at an event then like Stewart says try a PanoPro. The resolution (aka quality) on these is MUCH lower than any other method though. Imagine comparing the quality of 100 X 20MP pictures against 1 X 20mp picture shot in a fairground mirror.

3. The distortion you are seeing on online tours probably isn't to do with the focal length (at least not directly). Shoot a pano in a small space and the edges will distort pretty much no matter how you do it. Also, if you don't have the nodal point spot on you will get a shift as you rotate which looks like distortion.

Bottom line: I'd use a fisheye ;) Using an 8mm Sigma I can have a 360 pano shot and stitched on a laptop in less than 15 mins.

Also, PTGui is a work of genius.
 
For quick shots that include people I'd use the widest lens you can and reduce the amount of shots. Sigma 8mm on a crop body with a dedicated pano head requires 4 shots round (+ a nadir if you want to do one). Final images will be no different apart from resolution. As for stretching of the image at the edges, just reduce FOV in the software until it looks correct

Sigma 8mm https://www.google.com/maps/views/v...AAAGOoOa5Q?gl=gb&heading=376&pitch=90&fovy=75

Sigma 10-20 @10mm http://turningheadsphotography.co.uk/randd-2/
 
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Use an 8mm Fisheye and a Nodal Ninja ultimate R1 rotator. Shoot 4 around at 7.5 degrees above horizontal and then patch the nadir (whole at the bottom) for the fastest way of shooting. Remember to lock everything that you can i.e. exposure, white balance and focus. You might want to bracket the exposures, although this does produce problems with ghosting for moving objects i.e. people.

Stitch the images in PTGUI (or possibly Microsoft ICE) to produce a dongle 360 x 180 degree image and if you want to make it interactive, use Panotour Pro from Kolor.

Either that, or I'll come and do it for you.........
 
@pete.rush thanks, I saw this on the gadget show a couple of years ago, but the processing / scanning will be the issue.

@Johnytuono, I have the same kit, I will drop you a message when I get chance

@JonathanRyan A compromise between quality and speed is the key, pano pro will be too low, gigapan too much work - even with a high spec 6 core multi SSD computer.

@JH71 The museum is ace, well done. "Final images will be no different apart from resolution" was the answer to the original question that I asked. Thanks, I have got the confirmation that I needed.

@Skyviews100 flying you out to the events would be great, but probably more expense than I can bare, but you are only an hour away, and I would be interested in spending an hour or two "fast tracking" the software next year if that is possible?
 
Skyviews100 said:
Use an 8mm Fisheye and a Nodal Ninja ultimate R1 rotator. Shoot 4 around at 7.5 degrees above horizontal and then patch the nadir (whole at the bottom) for the fastest way of shooting.
Click to expand...

Interesting. The bits I've read have said to shoot at 8-10 degrees below horizontal, so you get a smaller blank spot at the bottom. Then you can shoot 1 or 2 for the zenith to fill in the top. Do you find angling up makes for fewer gaps? Like Gary, I've been thinking of adding a few of these into my events as well, so would be good to know the quickest way to shoot them.
 
Jayst84 said:
Interesting. The bits I've read have said to shoot at 8-10 degrees below horizontal, so you get a smaller blank spot at the bottom. Then you can shoot 1 or 2 for the zenith to fill in the top. Do you find angling up makes for fewer gaps? Like Gary, I've been thinking of adding a few of these into my events as well, so would be good to know the quickest way to shoot them.
Click to expand...

In general, nadirs are easier to patch than zeniths. Also, on nadir shots you have the small issue of the tripod.

Shoot 10 degrees below horizontal on an 8mm and you'll get a lot of tripod in the shot.
 
steveraw said:
I guess you should read a bit about lenses.
That may help you understand their differences and also you can choose one for your need.
Lenses Guide
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How amazingly condescending.

But congratulations for maintaining your 100% success rate in linking to your blog from every single post you make. That's the kind of attention to detail which is really appreciated.
 
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StewartR said:
How amazingly condescending.

But congratulations for maintaining your 100% success rate in linking to your blog from every single post you make. That's the kind of attention to detail which is really appreciated.
Click to expand...

Not that good attention to detail TBH. 404s ;)
 
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