Panoramas

You may have been puzzling over how these panoramas are created. There are two ways to create them. The first way is to use a rotating camera; think of those old school photos! The second way, and the one we use is to shoot a series of overlapping images like the set below. It can take anything from 6 to 12 images to do a full 360° depending on the lens used.

Sounds easy enough doesn't it? Well now, it gets interesting because unless the camera rotates around a very specific axis called the nodal point, the images will not align due to parallax errors . We get around this by using a special tripod head that can be offset to position the camera correctly. Oh, and lots of spirit levels to keep the horizon straight!

Once we have our images safely captured they can 'stitched' together. This is more than simply overlapping them as they need to warped to align perfectly. This is done using specialist proprietory software. The image above has been left uncropped so that you can see how they have been warped to let them blend into each other seamlessly.

The final image can then either be 'wrapped' to create a virtual cylinder for displaying on a computer as a QTVR panorama or cropped and printed conventionally. As well as cylindrical panoramas, we can also create spherical and cubic panoramas, whereby you can see both up and down.

Case Study

We shoot Panoramas for a wide range of clientele , but all you need to do is look to the top of the page. This panorama was one of a series shot for HSBC bank, commissioned by their Retail Design division in Sheffield. We were picked by them because we could deliver the job, to the standard required, within their timescale and to budget. Here is a link to view a full virtual tour of another HSBC branch shot for the same series.