As I mentioned in my last entry, I bought a Sigma 8mm f/3.5 circular fisheye lens. A couple days before that, I received my Nodal Ninja 5 Lite in the mail. The Nodal Ninja is a panoramic tripod head that allows you to pan horizontally and vertically around the entrance pupil (sometimes called ‘nodal point’) of the lens. This ability prevents parallax between photos when taking single or multiple row panoramas. This past weekend, I used my two newest additions to my photographic collection to create a QTVR, or Quick Time Virtual Reality panorama. By taking 6 photos, one every sixty degrees, one photo straight up, one photo straight down, I captured the image data needed for a panorama 360 degrees around and 180 degrees up and down. I used Hugin, an open source, free-ware software, to stitch the photos together, and Pano2QTVR to convert to a quicktime movie file to view online. The photo below is a link to the final movie. When/if I master this process, I will write an article about it.
*The file is 1.2MB and may take a few seconds/minutes to load depending on your connection.*