Google gone and done it

If you already have an Android phone and are willing to compromise a little on quality for convenience… then you are done. Any newish Android smartphone with Google’s new Camera app creates great 360° by 180° panoramas (Google calls them Photo Spheres).

“The best camera is the one you have with you” — Barry Staver

Many wilderness adventurers already bring a smartphone for GPS and photography among other uses. It has become the digital Swiss Army Knife of the outdoors and for the additional purpose of 360° by 180° panoramas it’s a no brainer.

It’s not perfect. The Moto X requires a whopping 50 photos to create a full 360° by 180° Photo Sphere. Another disadvantage with the smartphone is loss of control over the final product. What you see is what you get with Google Photo Spheres. There is no step for post production touchups and you have little to no creative control of exposure just as with other photography apps.

Google Camera app for any Android phone

Smartphone advantages:

Ultralight

Inexpensive

Multipurpose

Smartphone disadvantages:

Lower quality

No post adjustments

No long exposures

Smartphone route not for you? Read on…

Doing it yourself is heavy

You could spend days researching equipment for 360° by 180° panoramas. When I found this interview of a Google Trusted Photographer by Tested, it cleared up a lot of the questions about gear list and workflow.

To sum up the gear:

Use a crop sensor APS-C camera body (not full-frame!) A fisheye 8mm lens Simple panoramic head (6, 12 or 18 click stops) Any tripod will do

With this setup, you take six photos around the z-axis and a single photo of the floor beneath the tripod. These seven photos are stitched together to create the equirectangular image used to display the final 360° by 180° panorama.

“But why not use a full-frame camera, aren’t those the best?” Did you watch the video linked above? No? Then I will summarize. A fisheye lens produces a circular image on a full-frame sensor; the corners are not exposed and are black wasted pixels. On a crop sensor the full surface area is utilized by the fisheye lens producing a higher resolution panorama. It’s counterintuitive but so is the fact that a light roast coffee has more caffeine than a dark roast. Don’t ask, just drink the coffee.

Tested interviews a Google Trusted Photographer

Yes, it looks heavy because it is heavy. The problem with that general setup to anyone exploring the wilderness is weight. Even a cheaper DSLR body, autofocus lens, and a tripod including head will be well over three pounds, quickly approaching four.

Let’s go lighter.

Go mirrorless or go home

The first step is to ditch the DSLR and bring a mirrorless body. These cameras do not have the flip up mirror between the lens and sensor. No mirror means a reduction in weight and a simpler “less is more” shutter mechanism, a win win! All the major manufacturers have a mirrorless system. The Sony NEX5-T is the clear leader in its price category at $350 for the body only, which weighs a scant 250 grams with the battery.

Hard to beat the NEX5 series in price

One lens to rule them all

When choosing lenses I immediately check the lens performance list at Lonely Speck. Night photography and astrophotos should not be overlooked, and Lonely Speck reviews lenses that excel in that area giving you a good dual purpose lens. The recommended fisheye lens for APS-C mirrorless are the Rockinon/Bower/Samyang 8mm f/2.8 lenses.

These off-brand chunks of glass are a super value at under $300. They perform well wide open at f/2.8. The lack of autofocus means lightweight and compact. These manual lenses will outlast your camera body.

This lightweight lens is a winner

Bad puns about getting head

Ahoy thar be choices ahead.

This section has really come to a head.

Ok I’m done.

The panoramic head (cue fanfare). You can spend a lot of money here for what amounts to a fairly simple device. What makes a panoramic head a panoramic head is that it rotates on the nodal point (no-parallax) of the lens. This means that each photo is taken from exactly the same point in space. Stare at a point and alternately open and close each eye, the shift you see is parallax.

Nodal point is important because it makes life much easier when you get to the final creation of the equirectangular image. Many of the errors in Photo Spheres are the result of moving the smartphone around the user instead of around the lens. It’s parallax pandemonium.

The 110 gram Tom Shot 360 panohead

Nodal Ninja does what we want at $260, as does Bushman Panoramic at $225. The Panohead SV360 is inexpensive at $90. These options are not light; the SV360 is 870 grams. From my research, the lightest and most compact panoramic head is from Tom Shot 360 at $226. These are custom 3D printed to match specific lenses as well as camera combinations and weigh in at a featherweight 110 grams.

The tripod that isn’t a tripod

TrailPix is a cool company that started life as a fully funded Kickstarter project. The TrailPix tripod substitutes traditional tripod legs with your two trekking poles and a third leg: a pole, a stick, long thing, or whatever. I prefer the $35 TrailPix Universal because it allows for the most setup options without much of a weight penalty. A 50" tent pole and the TrailPix Universal weigh less than 150 grams.

Setup is simple and explained on the TrailPix website. I’ve found it to be stable enough for my purposes. Obviously, there is a big trade-off here in terms of the rigidity a classic tripod provides, but it has not been detrimental to my photography.

The TrailPix tripod in the less than 150 gram configuration

No photoshopping required

No it’s much worse. Ok it’s not that bad. It could be worse. You could be using the free Hugin software, which I tried. I really wanted it to work (it’s free!) but I could not get passed the constant crashing. Head to head comparisons between Hugin, PTgui trial and Autopano trial by Kolor, PTgui won every time. It was correct more often with less effort and did not crash. I also prefer software with a larger online community and most people you will talk to will be familiar with PTgui.

PTgui is not pretty but the panoramas it creates are

That was the case with Thomas from Tom Shot 360, who walked me through some of the workflow steps in PTgui using the 8mm lens on NEX body.

Here are his steps:

When you start out fresh without a template, just insert the 6 shots with a unique ceiling and ground. It will try to read the exif but since it’s all manual, cancel it. Enter in Lens Settings, Full Frame Fisheye, Focal length 8mm (it will probably come out as 20 later), 1.5x, field of view 103. Then open up the advanced tabs so you can see all the options. In Panorama Settings, enter Projection as equirectangular, 360x180. In Crop, you won’t need to do anything. Mask, only if you want to hide something or paint something in. Optimizer, set to heavy lens shift. Go back to the main tab and hit align. You can check the zenith and nadir to see if it looks good. If you want to make a more accurate alignment, press CTRL+SHIFT+W to delete worst control points. You can repeat it a few times. See what the optimizer shows, how many pixels off. 1-3 is good. Then, you can go to Control Points, add a few more points near the zenith and nadir of each set by using the Marque and right clicking in it and select generate control points here (you know how to do it?) Try to delete the ones where there could be moving objects, like plants, leaves, paper, strings. Hit F5 and see the results. You can press CTRL+SHIFT+W again to delete worst control points. Hit F5 again. Check again that it’s still in Heavy Lens Shift. Then, you can open up the control points table CTRL+B, sort it by highest, delete every point over 2. Press F5 again. Once everything looks right, go to Project Settings, set whatever you like. Then go to Create Panorama, set max optimize size, your file format, layers, I use PTGui as the stitcher and blender, feather sharp, default. Then File > save as template. You can use this now for your future shots. Also, you only press align once, at the beginning. Don't use it again later. Only change your crop, mask, control points, and use F5 to optimize each time you want to apply your changes. When you have the template, apply it to your shots once you drop them in for the first time. Then press align only once. You can delete worst control points and add more points if you think it's necessary, and press F5 to refresh. Also, when you rotate, you should grab the panohead. If the lens is a bit loose in your camera (which is normal sometimes) and you rotate by grabbing the camera instead, the projected image could shift a little bit across the sensor. It could throw off the alignment since the software assumes that each image has an identical projection. The optimizer does a good job in most situations though. In the worst case, you can activate viewpoint correction and it helps with some errors that you can seem to fix. In the future, if you shoot lots of panos on a trip, you can use the batch stitcher, which takes all your shots and stitches them in a queue using the template, and saves each job. If you don't mind small errors, it's good enough. If you want to check them, you can open each job and look at them, do some more control point/optimizing and saving them again. You should then pay attention to the "batch stitcher" settings in the project settings tab when you save your template. You can always overwrite your template later.

The best things in life are free

Did you know you can host simple web pages on Google Drive for free (up to your account storage space limit)? This extends to 360° by 180° panoramas exported for the web. PTgui will export an html file, a js file, an swf, along with around fifteen small tiles of your panorama.

Simply go to your Drive account. First create a new folder and set permissions to public on the web, then upload all of the above mentioned files to this folder. Click the uploaded html file. It will open a modal window and display the html source. Click the blue “Open” button in the bottom right. The html file will open again but in a standard docs interface. Click the small “Preview” text on the toolbar. This will open your file as a web page, and the URL in the browser address bar can be freely shared for anyone to view. Protip: use a URL shortener to prettify the link.

Shopping list total

Watch for used NEX5-N or NEX5-R bodies on Ebay some of which are selling for close to $100. Likewise look for a used 8mm fisheye to save money. The prices below are assuming you are starting without a camera body and buy everything retail.

Sony NEX5-T (253 grams) — $348

Rockinon 8mm f/2.8 (226 grams) — $279

Tom Shot 360 (110 grams) — $226

TrailPix Universal with pole (123 grams) — $50

PTgui Pro $202

Total cost: $1105

Total weight: 712 grams

That android phone is looking pretty good right about now, eh?