This is one of the 360 degree panoramas I’ve been happy with that I shot in the narrow and classic looking streets of Imaicho, Nara Japan back at the same time I shot some of the photos in this post. These types of panoramas have been something I’ve wanted to learn to shoot and edit for a while, especially so I would be able to turn them into image based lighting sources in 3d or mixed media scenes, but they have presented some new shooting and processing challenges. The main two being capturing all the images in the shortest amount of time to limit changes in light or weather and then the post processing needed to mask out ghosting or strange seams.
To capture this panorama I used the Nikon AF-S Fisheye NIKKOR 8-15mm f/3.5-4.5E ED Lens set at 12mm on my Nikon D850 and mounted to the Nodal Ninja NN6 panoramic head with a rotator. Since I wanted to capture as much light and shadow detail as possible for IBL (image based lighting) use later I did 5 bracketed exposures at 1 stop difference for each of the photos that needed to be captured. Rather than the 6 positions that would normally need to be captured for a 360 panorama at 12mm I chose to go for 12 to increase the overlap between images, especially since I’ve found the outer edges of the 8-15mm lens to be softer than I’d like.
After a couple attempts I was able to get a series of images that looked good while being outside in the cold.
The post processing first started in PTgui where it was relatively simple to pull in all of the images and align them. Due to the detail of the buildings it was easy to generate enough control points for PTgui to make the alignment process painless. Where things became more difficult was working to mask some of the images to blend seams in the sky and part of the nadir where the tripod was. Thanks to the tools from Erik Krause I was able to pull out the zenith and nadir as flat planes which I could then heal in Photoshop before re-importing them to PTgui and fixing the panorama. There’s still more I need to practice and learn with masking, I have shot a few other places where my timing wasn’t as good as with this series and I have people in some of the frames causing ghosting that needs to be masked out.
Once I get more of a flow built more will be posted here and they’ll likely turn up in new projects that are planned for this year.
