easiest method to get 360deg virtual tour using 5d/5d2 with 17-40L and normal tripod?

as above - i've been reading up on how to make 360degree virtual tours (interior use), but so far most of them only teach using a pano head and fisheye.

i'd like to avoid distortion, hence my choice for the 17-40L. how can i achieve that with a normal tripod and ballhead?

links to videos would be most helpful. thanks!

It depends on the quality of the result that you want.

The pano head ensures that you revolve around the nodal point of the lens - a normal head will not but the level of distortion you introduce sould be manaheable.

As for doing - ensure that everything is level and shoot with the camera in portrait enxuring that you get plenty of overlap on the images.

At 17mm you get a 70 degree horizontal field of view (with the camera in portrait) so I would be looking to shoot a 360 in 8 steps.

AT 40mm you get closer to 35 degree so would be looking at around 16-18 images. Rotate the camera through 20 degrees per shot gives you 18 shots.

Try to make sure that the images are equally spaced

the.forumer wrote in post #16315327
as above - i've been reading up on how to make 360degree virtual tours (interior use), but so far most of them only teach using a pano head and fisheye.

i'd like to avoid distortion, hence my choice for the 17-40L. how can i achieve that with a normal tripod and ballhead?

links to videos would be most helpful. thanks!

You're REALLY going to want a pano head and fisheye

Here is a pano calculator to help you sort out FOV and image overlap, etc.:

http://www.hdrlabs.com​/tools/panocalc.html

Using a standard pan move on a tripod will work okay (in terms of parallax) if your image plane if far away (like a landscape). For interiors, parallax errors get difficult to overcome very quickly as objects closer to the camera shift compared the background as you pan the camera around the tripod mount. You may have some luck in combating this by using Smartblend, a blending algorithm that attempts to account for parallax errors.

http://wiki.panotools.​org/SmartBlend

If you are going to shoot these kind of interior spherical panoramas, you will do yourself a big favor by investing in a dedicated pano head - even a relatively inexpensive one will give you the ability to locate and pan around the no parallax point (NPP) of your particular optical system.

Here is a nice write up about finding the NPP:

http://www.johnhpanos.​com/epcalib.htm

and here is some more basic information about the concept:

http://wiki.panotools.​org/No-parallax_point

This is really important because as you shoot a lot of image sets to stitch, if your set up is meticulous and repeatable, automation of the stitching process gets more and more efficient and saves you time and money.

good luck!

kirk

Here is an old thread I started with some images of the set up I use with a 5D and 5DII.

https://photography-on-the.net …045813&highligh​t=panorama

kirk

Smitty2k1 wrote in post #16316018
You're REALLY going to want a pano head and fisheye

Its a good trick if you can avoid distortion with a fisheye!

The software used to stitch the images shot with fisheye lenses take the distortion out of the final 360-degree spherical image. Check out panotour from kolor.com to see examples.
http://www.kolor.com …rtual-tours-360-home.html

Regards,
Jim Whitesell