Tutorial 1

In this tutorial, I’m showing you my three favourite panorama shooting techniques, all using an 8mm fisheye lens (the Peleng), both on full frame and crop cameras.

Virtually all of my panoramas on www.pano.ie are shot using either of these methods (or using a telescopic pole).

The first two use a so-called “philopod” — a string rather than a tripod — whereas the third technique involves a tripod and panorama head (the Nodal Ninja 3 in this case). The advantages of using a piece of string rather than a tripod are clear: It’s fast (takes virtually no time to set-up), it fits in any photo bag (just wrap it around the lens), it saves you from lugging around a heavy tripod+panohead, and it’s much more inconspicuous.

To read more about the brilliant “philopod pitch variation technique”.

I will also record a number of screen casts about how to post-process and stitch the images from this tutorial together to create the full 360×180° spherical panorama with no tripod in it, and do some retouching.

17 Comments on “Tutorial 1

  1. Awesome site, fabulous tutorials, great clarity and delivery. Extremely generous of you to be so kind and enthusiastic about pano photography. Well done and thank you for all your advice, tips and examples. Bravo Florian

  2. Thank you for a great tutorial – thanks for stepping through each step clearly and slowly.

  3. Very helpful, Florian. You are very generous with your knowledge. Thank you from Alaska. Question: I’m using a 15mm Sigma fisheye. In addition to shooting 12 images (every 30 degrees) and a nadir image, should I be including a zenith image as well? Thanks again!

  4. Is it important to use fish eye lenses? Wouldn’t a program like Panatour or PTGui be able to solve it anyway?

  5. I have a vanguard alta pro 263 AT tripod, can I use to shoot 360? or I need to buy additionally a tripod head which you have used in one of your tutorial?
    Thanks..

    • Sure you can use that tripod, but you’d need a panoramic tripod head in order to facilitate your panoramic photography.

  6. Hello. I have a problem with the orientation of the photos. I use the NIKON D5600 and the Sigma 8mm f3.5 Fish Eye optics. After stitching photos in PT Gui, photos on Google Maps on your PC are displayed correctly, but they appear on Android devices below. As if the photo was turned upside down. Where should I make a mistake? Thank you for your reply.

    • Hi Zsolt, not exactly sure I understand your issue… Can you point me to an example?

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