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Virtual
Tour Guide >> Equipment >> Lenses
Lenses for Virtual Tour Photos It's useful to have a wide angled or fish-eyed lens when shooting 360 panoramas. The size and type of lens you use will depend on the camera you plan to fix it to and the software you plan to stitch it with. Not all software allows you to stitch fisheye images together, but almost all software will allow you to stitch photographs taken using a wide angled lens. It is possible to create panoramas using only a standard size lens, but many shots will have to be taken in order to cover a full 360 degrees with the required overlap (recommended overlap is between 30% and 50%). Single row panoramas (one rotation at 0 degrees) are not a great problem with a standard sized lens, but multi-row (3 rotations, one at 0 degrees, one at 45 degrees up and one at 45 degrees down) are more difficult due to the amount of vertical overlap required between rows. See our VR heads section for more information about rows and rotation. Different lenses will give different results. Although the general rule is the wider lens the better in terms of fewer shots and more overlap, the wider the lens the lower the cumulative resolution of the shots used to create each movie. The wider the lens the more prone it will be to lens flare, this is especially noticeable when shooting multi-row panoramas where the ceiling lights are bright. To give an idea of the number of shots required for a full 360 x 180 multirow panorama it is as follows using an 18mm Sigma lens: Shoot 15 (24 degree increments) photographs at zero degrees vertical, this is the middle row. For single row panoramas that is all the photography that is necessary. For multi-row the camera is then angled down (using the panoramic head adjustment) at 45 degrees, a further 15 photographs are taken, the camera is angled up at 45 degrees and another 15 photographs taken. Then there must be one shot up to cover the zenith. The tripod is removed and one shot down is taken with the camera hand held to capture the nadir, this one is tricky so it's always worth taking a few extra shots just in case the first won't stitch. With a 14mm Sigma lens the same method is recommended for full 360x180 panoramas, but this time only 12 shots are needed per row, it is possible to make do with 10 shots per row, but this can present problems when stitching due to not having quite enough overlap. For information about sigma lenses visit:
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