How to take 360° Shots with a Point and Shoot

[kitteric]

Hi, I am an amateur photographer and security guard. I want to create a virtual tour of our facilities for training purposes. The problem is that I do not have the resources to buy a 360° optic or an expensive DSLR to mount one to. I have a Nikon L100 and would like to use this camera if possible. Can anyone give me some help here? Is there some way to construct a panoramic optic or know of any really inexpensive ones that can be used with a point and shoot camera such as mine? Thanks in advance.

[sybren]

The easiest way is to use Hugin to create your panorama. It can stitch and even do HDR for you. Check it out at Hugin - Panorama photo stitcher - there are plenty of tutorials on their website, including creation of 360 panos.

[inkista]

Mostly, it comes down to stitching and coverage. The problem with using a P&S is that you can't go particularly wide with one, so you have to shoot a lot of shots with the proper overlap, and hopefully without any parallax error. You may have to create a shooting rig of some kind.

If you hold the camera in landscape/horizontal orientation, you can probably do it in about a dozen shots. But you'll have a very narrow strip. You can increase the vertical coverage by shooting in portrait/vertical mode, but then you're talking about 20+ shots, and it's still going to be a narrow strip pano:


interactive view (requires Shockwave, a lot of bandwidth and probably a coffee break).

You can increase vertical coverage still more by shooting additional rows of images, but then you're talking about keeping the tilt/pitch constant, and you may end up needing a special panohead with rotational increments marked off, and a tripod (or a DIY alternative). If you're doing VR stuff indoors, a panohead becomes more of a necessity since nearby objects almost inevitably cause parallax error, and you'll need to rotate the lens around the no-parallax point or as close as you can get to it. And the lower-light may force you to use a tripod for slower shutter speeds, anyway.

If you didn't want to deal with all these member shots and stitching, your only other option would be trying to DIY something like this one-shot solution, or possibly using some kind of fisheye converter so you can shoot fewer shots to cover the 360 degrees. The problem with both of these types of solutions is that you generally don't get great high-quality panos out of them--image quality tends to get compromised.

If you are going to handhold a 360 pano with a P&S, the main things you want to keep in mind are: try not to move the camera in space as you rotate it. Try not to tilt the camera up and down as you rotate it. Try to overlap by a third of the frame. Use a non-auto white balance, and if you can lock the exposure settings for all the shots, try to do that, so you don't have a light-and-dark issue when you try to blend the images. Avoid moving scenes or moving objects.

Hugin is probably the best free panostitching tool for this task but being so full-featured it can be a bit overwhelming; you may have an easier time with something like Autostitch. If you want to deliver in an interactive file format, Pano2VR is probably your best solution.

Sorry. That's probably more than you ever wanted to know about shooting panos.