My setup for 360 Virtual Tours

I received a reader question about what setup I use for 360 photos. I use a Canon 1Ds with a Sigma 8mm fisheye lens and a simple homemade bracket for my tripod that mounts the camera so it rotates around the entrance pupil of the lens and has a bubble level to keep the camera level in two planes while rotating. When shooting a 360 photo this setup allows me to quickly shoot 4 fisheye images that can be stitched together to create a complete spherical image. Click here for a more detailed example. I use PTGui to stitch the 4 fisheye images together. Using this setup the shooting time is about 30 to 45 seconds per 360 image. When I'm not shooting the interior of a home I don't bother with the tripod so I can do 360 steet images etc without dragging around a tripod. I love to shot street 360 images this way.

I put 5 to 10 - 360 photos together to form a virtual tour for a home that looks like this. I host the 360 photos in two formats: FlashVR is the format you see initially. This is a Flash based format that 90+ percent of visitors can immediately see. Since these Flash tours are not the highest quality possible I also provide a link to a QuickTime tour of the same images for those viewers that either have QuickTime installed or are willing to install it to see the tour.