HDR 360 Panorama Photography

Here we cover the main two reasons that I choose to shoot panoramas in HDR, as well as details on what exactly is High Dynamic Range in an image.

Now we get into the specifics of my camera equipment for shooting panoramas. The kit I use is one of 100's of possible combinations so we also look at how to find the info you need in your manuals, and decide yourself how to assemble the correct working combination of accessories.

In this lesson we will specifically show how you can achieve the three general rules of shooting panoramic images. 1) shoot photos that overlap, 2) camera must pivot around the lens nodal point, and 3) exposure should stay consistent.

Here we are going to discuss how many shots to take for you bracket and what shutter speed they should be at. This always depends on how quickly you need to shoot everything, what the lighting conditions are, interior, exterior, and what is the range of light in your full 360 scene.

This video will be a step by step demonstration of actually shooting the panorama. We will begin with a general set of rules, and use all of the details we have covered in previous lessons. On location in a beautiful garden I will shoot a couple of panos and show different situations and how to get the best results.

Once you get home from a shoot, you can easily have 1000 plus photos on your camera. While the work is fresh in your mind it is important to organize these photos and plan out a directory structure, file naming, and organization in Lightroom or XnView.

Now our goal is to reduce our 90 bracketed photos into a set of 10 main camera angles that will later be stitched together into the full 360 panorama. We will use Photomatix to batch merge our color corrected brackets into first HDR shots, and second jpeg versions of the same shots for the actual stitching process.

This lesson will cover the stitching step of creating a 360 panorama. Our main software tool here is PTgui, but I will also demonstrate using free shareware Hugin for this same purpose. There are many ways to assemble an HDR 360 pano, but this hybrid method here is the most dependable and repeatable workflow that will guarantee high quality results.

Now that the HDR pano is stitched and rendered it is time for cleanup. Most importantly we will learn how to paint out the nodal ninja and tripod. In addition now is the time to paint fix any shadows, lens dirt, sun flare or other distracting mistakes left in the pano. Also the prefect time for final color correction and white balance in Nuke software.

Now that we have a beautiful hi resolution HDR pano we can use that lighting information inside of a 3D package like Maya for image based lighting (IBL). I demonstrate illuminating a 3D model with the pano we stitched in Lecture 9, as well as introducing the concept of photogrammetry which I will use in future courses to create 360 VR films.

This is a wrap up of what we have covered, as well as a peek into future possible courses. My passion for creating these HDR panoramic images continues with other parallel photography techniques such as photogrammetry and Virtual Reality. Here I present a recently created short called Memory Dome that is CG film panoramics, made up of completely photographic elements.