Panoramas

Three flavors of panoramas

In terms of the format of panoramas, there are essentially three different kinds: 

• Partial panoramas that you know mainly from traditional landscape photography. They are created by stitching (assembling) of multiple normal photos together side-by-side, which creates a photo with much wider angle that would be possible with a normal lens.
  360Cities does not support partial panoramas.
• Cylindrical 360º panoramas - One notch higher are 360° photos which capture the whole field of view in all directions around the photographer. These are sometimes called cylindrical panoramas. They cover 360-degrees around but not up and down view. These are too created by stitching multiple photos together. The only real difference from partial panoramas is that you need to make sure the first and the last photos overlap. There are also so called "one shot" 360-degree lenses but they are by definition very low quality compared to the traditional stitched panoramas.
  
• Spherical panoramas are the top of the line which not only capture the 360-degree field of view but in which you can also look up and down. They can even be taken in a way that you can't see the tripod nor the photographer's shadow in the picture. 

The secret of creating 360 panoramas

So, what is the secret of creating a 360 panorama? It's actually pretty easy. You, the photographer, choose a place from which you want the panorama to be taken. Then you start taking photos around yourself until you cover the whole intended field of view with photos. It does not really matter what camera or lens you use, you can even use a cell phone, as long as the photos overlap. The easiest, though, is to use a digital SLR camera with a fisheye lens. The wider the viewing angle of the lens is, the less photos you need to cover the entire field of view. With a cell phone, you will need many photos, with a fisheye lens, you need as little as three to cover the entire sphere. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ouOEM4cKKGc

This video shows how to take fully spherical 360 panoramas without the visible tripod. 



http://help.360cities.net/taking-panoramic-pictures/how-to-get-started