360 degree photography

[thetapeworm]

Having got into 360 degree photos on my phone with mixed results I decided to move on to an actual 360 camera last year and bought one of the first Xiaomi Mijia 360 cameras from China. Since then I've been through 10s of firmware updates, various apps and lots of playing around to a point where I'm now fairly happy with the output from this little entry-level device.

It's amazing to see how the technology is jumping forward with things like the Matterport camera and some of the high-end professional stuff that's appearing now.

I was just curious if anyone on here is playing around with 360, either with a DSLR and stitching or with dedicated 360 cameras. Perhaps there are pro 360 people on here I can pester for help too?

[SCEtoAUX]

I do a lot of photography work for an independent school and they wanted a photo tour built. They wanted me to do it so a bit of investment and learning was needed. I won't be taking the photos for real until late May when the flowers/leaves are out but we've been doing tests and all is looking good.

I use a Nikon D700 and 18-35mm (at 18mm). I have one of these mounted to my tripod: Y

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0077AXN6Y/

You need something like this to avoid parallax errors when taking pics because otherwise there will be errors when stiched.

There are cheaper options, ans the Nodal Ninja series (at around £450 for the NN6) seems to be the choice of many, but I am very happy with what I bought.

I take two rows of 12 photos. Pointing down at 30 degrees and up at 35 degrees. That leaves a bit of sky and ground to patch but that's simplicity itself. (Done in PanoVR2 Pro_

Once I have my photos (24 for each 360 pic) I process then in Lightroom and then export for use in PTGUI - That is used to stitch the photos into a panorama and the latest beta version (11) is superb. I found version 10 to be a bit flaky with regard to image rotation. It was also where I discovered that taking 12 photos per row was the way to go. Big overlaps help to produce a totally seamless job.

Once I have my photos I import them into PanoVR2 Pro - This is what is used to create a photo tour and it's a pretty heavyweight bit of software. Full of features and it can be skinned to perfectly match any branding that the client has.

Cost? Nodal head for tripod cost £250.00, PTGUI licence around £100.00, PanoVR2 £300.00. Of course I already had my camera and lens but if I were buying those I'd have looked at slightly lighter options, possibly going for a crop sensor camera and a 10mm lens.

Since starting this project I've already had two other clients want photo tours and I reckon that this is an untapped source of photography work. The reason being is that it isn't particularly artistic, requires quite a bit of learning techniques, needs a bit of investment and I don't think it would be appealing to many professional photographers. (Which I regard myself as, even though it only generates about 50% of my income).

[thetapeworm]

Great reply, just the kind of thing I was hoping someone might come back with

I have a "proper" camera and was toying with the idea of using that as an alternative to the 360 one as the resolution is far superior but for now I'm just playing around and doing some fairly basic images for people.

As you say it seems to be a fairly untapped area at the moment that's likely to gain popularity, a lot of the chaps on the product specific groups I'm on are also proper photographers and the work they are doing for estate agents and the like are really impressive.

Despite using a 360 camera my workflow is still fairly intensive at the moment, I used to shoot RAW, edit the image to improve colour etc, stitch with a piece of software called MiSphere Converter and then do some additional tinkering in PhotoDirector 9.0. I am now looking at bracketed JPGs and PhotoMatix software to combine these as the people doing tours with this camera seem to be having great results.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

[SCEtoAUX]

You're welcome. Good luck with the photos.

[pidsy]

SCEtoAUX said:

I do a lot of photography work for an independent school and they wanted a photo tour built. They wanted me to do it so a bit of investment and learning was needed. I won't be taking the photos for real until late May when the flowers/leaves are out but we've been doing tests and all is looking good.

we've had a company do his for us last year (big public school) - all went well until launch and someone realised that there are major implications when it comes to safeguarding. obviously the exterior tour is OK but the interior tour was full of corridor after corridor with images of our pupils. all of which would have to be blurred out before we could use it legally.
the company employed to do it hadn't realised and didn't want to go back and remove the many images so we binned it in the end.

happy to provide a link if you PM me.

[thetapeworm]

Crazy that safeguarding wasn't already high on their list of considerations, I was going to do my daughter's school for my own practice and to give them a free extra for their website, one of my big overheads was always going to be blurring things on walls.

[anonymous-user]

pidsy said:

we've had a company do his for us last year (big public school) - all went well until launch and someone realised that there are major implications when it comes to safeguarding. obviously the exterior tour is OK but the interior tour was full of corridor after corridor with images of our pupils. all of which would have to be blurred out before we could use it legally.
the company employed to do it hadn't realised and didn't want to go back and remove the many images so we binned it in the end.

happy to provide a link if you PM me.

I had something similar, but we found a off shore Photoshop house, that blurred each face for 5p per face instance.

[pidsy]

I think they were new to the game to be fair.

[thetapeworm]

I want to get on the face blurring gig

[SCEtoAUX]

pidsy said:

SCEtoAUX said:

I do a lot of photography work for an independent school and they wanted a photo tour built. They wanted me to do it so a bit of investment and learning was needed. I won't be taking the photos for real until late May when the flowers/leaves are out but we've been doing tests and all is looking good.

we've had a company do his for us last year (big public school) - all went well until launch and someone realised that there are major implications when it comes to safeguarding. obviously the exterior tour is OK but the interior tour was full of corridor after corridor with images of our pupils. all of which would have to be blurred out before we could use it legally.
the company employed to do it hadn't realised and didn't want to go back and remove the many images so we binned it in the end.

happy to provide a link if you PM me.

Oh I've been working for them for years, and they've got signed consent from all parents in this respect. Pupils photos are already all over the website, print media, social media. This is an independent school and they know the law. Besides, the tour won't have any pupils in. It's to show facilities and I take/took photos on weekends and when locations are empty.

[SCEtoAUX]

Also... You don't want people in a 360 photo anyway. They move which equals a stitching nightmare. I guess one of those rigs with two cameras equipped with a fisheye lens each would do the panorama in one shot, but I want DSLR resolution and quality.

[pidsy]

There wasn’t anyone in the tour, it was done during the holidays.

The school has an extensive list of pupils who cannot be used in publicity.
The walls of many corridors (particularly the junior and first schools) have images of the kids - whether it’s society photos, author visit photos, class photos etc.

Our solicitors wouldn’t allow the possibility of one of these images having one of these pupils in so made us bin it.

The guys who did it refused to go through and blur faces so it was never used. The exterior tour is fine though.

We do have quite highly strung parents - not worth the possibility of aggro from them.