What is 360 photography? How to make 360 degree panorama?
360 photography usually refers to 360 degree Panoramic photography. The simple and fast way to make 360 photography is to shoot photos with a DSLR, fisheye lens and a professinal panoramic head and stitch them with panorama software.
What is a panorama exactly?
A panorama is any wide-angle view or representation of a physical space, whether in painting, drawing, photography, film, or a three-dimensional model.
Panorama normally refers to a image with which you could view more scene with your eyes(auxiliary equipments are excluded of course), more often than not, panorama refer to 360 degree view horizaiontally (either include the sky and the floor, or sometimes not).
You could create a Cylindrical panorama by yourself: when you stand in one fixed point, hold your hand still with camera and turn your body in clock-wise or counter, you can shoot a 360 degree cylindrical panorama when you turn your body for 360 degree. In this panorama, you can not see the part of the ground where your feet were standing at or the circle of sky where above your head, this is a cylindrical panorama when you see it and drag around on the computer.
Imagine that the camera and the lens as a whole is a radar with a certain scan area( may vary in size but will work in the same way). The radar has to be fixed in a certain point in order to have a complete 360 scan of the things around it. This point is in the camera lens called "Nodal point" and that is why we need the pano head that is especially designed for fixing this point so that the panorama will be stitched by Panoweaver successfully( as in the radar have a complete 360 scan of the things around it)
If I have no DSLR or Fisheye lens for 360 photography, can I make a panorama?
If you do not have DSLR or Fisheye lens, you could use any digital camera at hand, just calculate the photos numbers required for a cylindrical or spherical panorama stitching and shoot normal photos, then stitch them together with Panoweaver. You may refer to this page to calculate how many photos you should take: http://www.easypano.com/Panorama-software-47_382.html
1. There should be around 1/4 overlaps of the two consecutive images to ensure the Panoweaver could stitch the images into a good panorama, too little or too much overlaps may lead to the faliar of the stitching altogether.
2. Due to the Auto mode of some of the camera device, you may find the images are inconsistent in a obvious and the Panoweaver may not stitch the panorama very well, you could try the "Strong algorithum" and see if it improve, but this is the drawbacks of camera if you have the auto model(in some camera this feature is not optional, that is why we suggest you use Digital Camera DSLR)
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