What equipment do you need to take panoramas for virtual tours?
The camera: To create high-quality panoramic images, you need a high-quality DSLR camera with interchangeable lenses and preferably with exposure bracketing. You need interchangeable lenses because using a fisheye or wide angle lens is almost essential to creating an effective and detailed panorama without having to take half a million individual images. Using a wide angle or fisheye lens also means you’ll want to invest in a very high megapixel camera. This is because a wide-angle lens bends light so that more of the image can fit in the same number of pixels. A low megapixel camera will not have a high enough resolution to be able to handle the stretching around the edge of the fisheye image. I wouldn’t use a fisheye lens with a less than 16 megapixel camera and a wide angle lens with a less than 10 megapixel camera.
If your budget allows, definitely go for a camera that has exposure bracketing, this will allow you to shoot high dynamic range (or HDR) images and is a fantastic tool for producing round exposure images for your virtual tours. High megapixels and exposure bracketing are features you’ll find on any professional-grade DSLR camera. For the entry level I highly recommend the Canon 60d, you can pick one up for around £600 and they produce fantastic images. If you’re willing to spend a bit more, the Canon EOS 5D Mark ii remains my go-to for photography on the go any day of the week, bodies are available for under £2000.
The Lens: Opinions differ as to what type of lens produces the best results. Some virtual tour photographers use wide-angle lenses, others prefer full fisheye. Both have their merits: wide-angle lenses create less pixel distortion around the edges of images and reduce the risk of pixelation within a panorama that can seriously damage the quality of your virtual tour. However, they require many more images to create a single panorama. This can greatly lengthen production and post-processing time and increase the chance that one or two of your images will not stitch together correctly. Full fisheye lenses on the other hand only need a few images to create a full panorama, the trade off is that they use the same number of pixels to take a much larger photo therefore the images are of smaller quality. It seems to me that if you use a fisheye lens correctly, take photos that are well focused, and pay attention to how your images look, then there’s nothing a fisheye can’t do better, easier, and in less time than a wide angle. I highly recommend the Sigma 8mm autofocus which you can pick up for around £800.
The Tripod: Tripods are one of those things that amateur photographers almost always feel the need to get wrong several times before they get it right. You have to remember that your panoramic scene MUST be centered around the nodal point, your first concern is to make sure the camera doesn’t move even a bit from the nodal position during the shot. Your enemies are the wind, accidentally hitting the tripod and having to change the position of the tripod head, all of which can be avoided by investing in good sturdy gear. You can buy Manfrotto tripod legs and heads for under £500. A tripod ball head is particularly useful, as you can easily level your Panohead through a full 360 degrees, even in sticky situations or rough terrain. I recently shot a panoramic shot of a 4-story sculpture from a beam nine feet in the air. The only way I was able to make the tripod stable was by supporting 2 legs on a wooden slat and the last one on the beam, the tripod was almost bent like an old man; Without a ball tripod head, taking a panorama would have been impossible.
The Panohead: A Panohead is a specialized piece of equipment used to find the nodal point (or no parallax). The nodal point is very important when taking panoramic images, as it allows each image to be taken from exactly the same perspective. If the perspective changes even a few millimeters, the objects will look a bit closer or further apart from each other, which means that when you stitch them together, you’re in big trouble. There are ways to tackle this without investing in a tripod and pan head, for example the Philopod pitch shifting method is very popular; however, if you want panoramas that you can be sure will come together correctly every time, a good tripod and pan head are essential. Panoheads come in many shapes and sizes, from the inexpensive Panosaurous to the monstrous motorized auto-rotating VR head. After experimenting with several of these, I’ve found that there’s very little you can accomplish with Panoheads’ baby fully robotic T-800 Astala-vista super dooper that you can’t do with a tight mid-range modular setup. Pick up an award-winning but refreshingly wallet-friendly £200 ninja nodal.
With a good DSLR camera, the right lens, a sturdy tripod, and a stylish panorama head, you’ll be well on your way to creating beautiful panoramic images to use in a virtual tour.