Recently I tried to do a 360 degree panorama where I had to walk around a pond that was in the middle of where I wanted to shoot from.
Needless to say, it failed because even though I took a photograph at every 45 degrees, the change in perspective was big enough to mean that Bridge/LR/PtGui all just fell in a heap.
Hi,
Well not really surprising, because those applications use a geometrical projection model that requires the elimination of parallax between tiles, i.e. requires shooting from a single point of rotation. The only exception (that e.g. PTGUI offers) is the stitching of a flat plane, because that can be assembled from shots that were taken from different positions. A flat plane cannot have parallax.
When faced with such a situation where you can't "stand in the middle" but instead have to walk around something, do you...
- take images every 22.5 degrees (or more?)
- use a dedicated application?
- just forget about it?
I do not see a simple solution resulting in a single image/print. You can somewhat reduce the parallax issue by using a very long telelens, and make a pano of the horizon. The further away objects are, the less the parallax will be visible.
Instead I'd take another approach, e.g. shoot multiple 360 degree VR panos, and create a tour with links between the panos, thus allowing to click on a 'hotspot' (link) to move to a new vantagepoint from which another 360 degree VR pano can be viewed. You can make it as fancy as you want, with a mapview and compass etc. But this only works as an interactive pano, viewed e.g. on a display. You can probably even make a tour between regular panoramas (haven't tried that myself yet).
A program like
Pano2VR can make such virtual Tours.
A completely different approach, but I've not tried that for your scenario, is to view the pond as an object and view that object (and its backdrop) from different angles (like an interactive product catalog's view on items that rotate). I'm not sure how gracefully these programs handle a non-featureless backdrop though. Maybe a try with
Object2VR will show if that could work.
Cheers,
Bart
