I’ve been trying to figure out how to make interactive panoramas for the web. One of the problems is capturing the images.

I have a tripod and fisheye lens, so I was most of the way to shooting perfect panos, but you get parallax issues. As you rotate the camera its perspective changes; it’s position is moving in a circle, so you can see past stuff in one shot that you couldn’t in another. That causes glitches in the stitched-together panorama.

You can buy a head to help you shoot perfect panoramas, or even get a robotic one that does the whole thing for you. I’m too tight for that, so I made one out of wood and leftover pieces of Ikea furniture.

It has 3 holes for the camera, allowing me to point the camera up, down or straight. By using up and down positions, I can get a fairly good vertical field of view from my lowly non-fullframe camera. Read the rest of this entry »