One of the things that is easier about photography in the digital age – or more importantly the internet age – is gaining inspiration from the work of others. All over the internet you can find examples of techniques and tricks that other photographers are using both regularly, and as an experiment. One of those techniques that I’ve been intrigued by is an extension of the panorama idea where you stitch multiple photographs together to get a 180 or a 360 degree view of a scene, to project the panorama onto a sphere and create what is called as a planetoid.
Last Monday I promised a week of travel shots from the previous week, which I had spent in Croatia. That week ended yesterday, but since then I managed to put together a first attempt at a planetoid, using a scene that I photographed in the harbour in Dubrovnik during my early morning visit, so thought that I would post it as an 8th post from that trip.
It’s by no means the best example in the world of a planetoid – the name comes from the fact that the effect of the technique is to represent the scene being photographed as a mini planet – as it is my first time attempting it, but I thought it would be worth posting to give an idea of how I did it, and maybe give you the idea of trying it out also.
A word of warning – I have no idea if this is the best technique for creating a planetoid, but it is a breakdown of how I created the shot, with the results you see above.
First of all, you want to aim to photograph the entire scene around you in as few shots as possible to make the post-processing easy. Contradicting this is the need to have overlap between neighbouring images so that the software that you use to merge the shots – more on this later – has a good chance of getting reasonable results without your manual intervention. My choice of lens to deal with these issue was my spherical fisheye because it gives 180 degree field of view (diagonally) and so with three shots I could get a full 360 degree sweep, including overlap. In the end, to improve my chances of a decent merged image, I opted to take 4 shots, each 90 degrees apart (these are shots 1 – 4).
That first set of shots gives you a 360 degree view left or right, but not up or down, and so you need to repeat this step twice – once with the camera tilted 45 degrees up (shots 5 – 8), and the other with it tilted 45 degrees down (shots 9 – 12). Finally you take a shot looking straight up (shot 13), and one looking straight down (shot 14). I actually didn’t take these last two, so ended up with 12 shots in total, but if you do, for shot 14 make sure to exclude your feet.
You need not do all this with a fisheye lens, but use the widest you can. You will probably need more than 14 shots if the focal length is longer, and the field of view narrower.
While taking the shots the three main things to remember are exposure, focus and camera position.
For exposure you’ll probably have to compromise at some point around the sweep because it’s important to stick with the same exposure for every shot. I suggest metering all around you before you start shooting, choosing an exposure that is a trade off between all extremes, dialling that into the camera, and leaving it untouched until all 14 shots are taken.
For focus, the rule is simple – use a small aperture and manually set your focus. With a fisheye, and its near infinite depth of field, where you focus on isn’t so critical. For a standard wide angle lens, about a third of the way between you and the horizon is probably a good focus point. Above all though, ensure it doesn’t change between shots.
For camera position, the key is to pivot the camera about a single point. Ideally put the camera on a tripod. Some people use a special head called a pano head, which allows the camera to pivot such that the sensor in the camera stays at the same point. I didn’t, and even if you don’t have a tripod with you the merging software is at a stage now though where you can try these hand held and probably get away with it. For this particular set of shots I used a cheap compact tripod.
Once you have the shots taken, you need to merge them using software. Recent versions of Photoshop have a Photomerge tool which will merge your shots. You’ll need to opt for a spherical projection, and usually you can choose where to put the centre of the image. I opted for the point which was where I was standing. Other options are stand alone pieces of software, specifically for this purpose. For this shot I used Hugin, which is a bit cumbersome and slow, but got the job done. Another tool is called Autopano.
I mentioned I didn’t take a shot straight up (shot 13) or down (shot 14) – this was an omission on my part, so instead I had to clone a small amount into the final image where both those frames would have been, but this was straight forward. The straight up shot would have just introduced pure blue sky so I just cloned a neighbouring part in the final projection. The straight down shot was the top of the pillar on which I had the camera, and also easily cloned. Another option is to put a logo in the center of the image to obscure where shot 14 would be, as this shot can be difficult to get without including your feet. Looking at examples on flickr often photographers use this logo idea.
So there you have it – that is a quick overview of how I created this shot. If you want to try it, I suggest doing more research online for different techniques and look for inspiration on the web. It’s what I did, and the best way to get a feeling for what will work in terms of a scene. I’ll try this again with a better scene, and reckon it would be fun to try also in a group of people. Regardless, it’s another technique to add to the bag of tricks.
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