Content Creation for photographers

Content Creation for photographers

Welcome photographers! This section of RCX Academy will get you started on creating 360° photos covering techniques, equipment and software.
360° Photography is a technique of capturing an image that spans all degrees of view in a sphere. There are two workflow approaches to taking a 360° photograph:
  1. Using a DSLR/Mirrorless camera and stitching multiple images together with software
  2. Using a dedicated 360° camera
Each approach has pros and cons that need to be considered. Below is a table comparing the two approaches.
Camera Type
Capture Speed
Image Stitching
Image Quality
Difficultly
Required Gear
Dedicated 360° camera
Faster
Performed in camera
Lower
Fairly Easy
360° camera, tripod, smartphone (optional)
DSLR/Mirrorless
Slower
Software required
Higher
Very Difficult
Camera, lenses, panorama head, tripod, remote capture device

Dedicated 360º Cameras

Dedicated 360° cameras are designed for capturing 360° photos and videos, providing a single file as the output. The capture process for dedicated 360° cameras is similar to taking a photo with a smartphone or point and shoot camera. Dedicated 360° cameras are perfect for generating a large number of photos quickly with no post-processing required.
They are perfect for
  1. Real-estate
  2. Architecture and Interior Design workflows
  3. Virtual tours
Important factors to consider when purchasing a dedicated 360° camera is the output resolution of the image, whether it offers High Dynamic Range (HDR) capture and the reviews other users have given the product.
A 360° image has to pack a huge amount of information into a rectangular area. On average, traditional photographic lenses only provide around a 45° field of view. Whereas a 360° image is providing a 360° field of view so the image quality is always going to be much lower when comparing images of the same pixel resolution.
High Dynamic Range capture is a process of merging multiple exposure levels in camera to provide the correct exposure levels for the entire view.

DSLR and Mirrorless Cameras

Info
This documentation is provided as an introduction to the process of creating 360° panoramas. Further research and experimentation is not only recommended, but vital in achieving any usable results.
The process for capturing a 360° panorama with a 'traditional' camera is also called a 'multi-row spherical panorama', which describes a few elements of the image:
  1. A 'panorama' is defined as an image with a width greater than is 2x height.
  2. 'Multi-row' refers to the technique of capturing multiple rows of images and stitching them together.
  3. 'Spherical' or 'spherical projection' denotes that the image covers a full 360° sphere.
The process of creating 'multi-row spherical panoramas' is technically challenging requiring some experimentation and practice to produce a good image. However, the quality and resolution of images can be magnitudes greater than a dedicated 360° Camera when captured and processed correctly.

Equipment

Any DSLR or Mirrorless camera is capable of creating 360° panoramas. The ability to create a 360° image relies on a workflow and the accompanying equipment rather than the cameras features.
  1. A camera!
  2. A stable tripod
    1. A spirit level indicator on the tripod and on the tripod head is ideal.
    2. Some cameras also have an electronic level indicator, this can also be useful but not a requirement.
    3. Level everything, check and recheck, rotate the head all the way around and angle it up and down to ensure everything is level.
  3. A multi-row panoramic head
    1. These are required to achieve a decent result and avoid errors in the capture process.
    2. Look for ones with a degrees indicator on all axes.
Other equipment that improves the workflow:
  1. Motorised panorama head, speeds up the process of capturing many images.
  2. Remote capture device, allows you to take photos without touching the camera to avoid camera shake.

Preparations

To prepare the camera for capturing the multi-row panorama, there are a few things that must be considered:
  1. Complete leveling of the tripod and camera. This will ensure that the stitched panorama is level.
  2. Determining the "entrance pupil" of the lens.
    1. The entrance pupil is the point of the lens that you want to rotate the camera around. This removes parallax errors and will help with stitching of the images later. For more information, see this article.
  3. Calculate the required number of images to capture.
    1. There are a number of online resources that can help with this. One such resource is this calculator, which uses the camera's sensor size, lens focal length and overlap percentage of the images.
  4. Experimentation

Stitching the images

Now that all the images have been captured, its time to stitch them together!
A number of photo editing software provide workflows for stitching multi-row panoramas. Here are some examples:
  1. Adobe Lightroom:https://www.adobe.com/au/products/photoshop-lightroom.html
  2. Adobe Photoshop: https://www.adobe.com/au/products/photoshop.html

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