Have you ever been in a place that is so interesting that you wished you could photograph the whole thing?

Did you know you can make a picture that surrounds you completely? It's called a spherical panorama, and you can see it in more and more websites every day. You only need to have Quicktime installed, or better yet, a plugin called DevalVR.

There are also websites that will teach you techniques to make your own panoramas, like for instance panoramas.dk. The problem is that you get the sense that you need pretty hefty equipment to even get started. Not anymore! In this article, I spill the beans on how to use a point and shoot camera (maybe even the one in your cell phone) to make these gorgeous panoramas and send them to friends and family.

OK, first off, you have to be able to view the finished panorama. Let's see if you can see the inside of this church...

This particular panorama is in the "equirectangular" format, and is a computer file with the extension "jpg" You will see it properly a plugin called DevalVR, which will use all the muscle in your expensive video card to scroll the picture smoothly. You can also zoom in and out with the mouse wheel, or make it full screenfor even more breathtaking results. You can also save the file and use the standalone DevalVR player to see it when not online.

The next thing you need is a camera. I recommend digital cameras because the film is essentially free and unlimited. Also, we're going to be manipulating lots of images in the computer, so the digital format saves a lot of work. I use a Canon Powershot A720, which can be set to manual exposure for best results. Not all cameras can do this, but it is still possible to make good panoramas with a fully automatic camera. I'll tell you further down what you need to watch out for

The most important step in obtaining a good panorama is shooting it correctly. There is no digital darkroom technique that can fix a poorly shot panorama, with blank spots or large parallax. Let me go into a little detail on these:

• Blank spots happen when no picture covers a certain area of the visual field. Besides looking like a pirate's black eyepatch, blank spots often cause the processing software to fail in getting the pictures aligned to make a continuous picture. It is very important to shoot using a pattern that eliminates blank spots. More on this pattern later.
• Parallax happens when the camera does not maintain the same position in space for all the shots (and there will be many of them). With few exceptions, the processing software assumes that all the shots were taken from the exact same position in space, so moving the camera between shots causes errors such as broken straight lines and patterns with defects in them. Parallax can be especially severe when there are near objects as well as distant objects.

To avoid blank spots, you need to know the field of view of your camera, that is, how many pictures you need to take in order to make a full circle. This is, by the way, the easiest way to determine it. First, hold your camera level and in portrait mode (vertical), and zoom out completely. Choose a place with distant objects and start shooting, turning on your feet (left or right, it doesn't matter; I always turn right because that helps later on when using the software), so that each new picture overlaps ever so slightly with the previous one. When you're done, count how many pictures you needed to make the complete circle. If it is 8 or fewer, congratulations, you have a very wide-angle camera capable of smaller circles, which will save you some pictures. Chances are it will be more than 8 but less than 13; in that case, which is that of my camera, you will be shooting 12 pictures per circle.

And this is the way you'll be shooting, so you can avoid all the problems at the same time:

• First, mark a spot on the ground; you may want to put a coin or something on that spot. A disk like the one below, with the shooting directions marked on it works even better.
• Do yourself a favor and shoot at the lowest resolution you can, without falling into 640x480 territory. You don't need a lot of resolution since you'll be adding a lot of pictures, and the software will thank you for the smaller files it has to process.
• Then, hold your camera in portrait mode, at eye level, so that the lens, extended, is right above the spot you marked on the ground. Some people use a device called a "philopod", made with a weight and a string tied around the lens, but you may be able to do just as well without it with some practice. Here's one, made by my good friend Craig Johnson, including the disk I mentioned earlier:

• Now choose a direction to start shooting; if the place has a clearly defined axis (like a square, or a street), pick a direction that you can feel without even looking through the lens.
• Shoot the first picture and now turn 30 degrees (from 12 to 1 in a clock), making sure the camera lens stays over the spot you marked. This means that your feet will need to move partially around the spot on the ground.
• Shoot two more pictures, shifting your feet by 30 degrees each time. Now you should be looking at right angles from your original position. If not, don't worry because the software can correct for that, but tell yourself to calm down and stay on the pattern. Make sure the lens stays at eye level, right above the spot on the ground.
• You are counting the shots, right? On the seventh shot, you should be looking in exactly the opposite direction from where you started. Your thirteenth shot should have you looking back the way you were at the start, and your feet have stood on all the hours of an imaginary clock lying on the floor, with its center at the marker.
• If your camera can take a circle with only eight shots (allowing enough overlap between pictures), then you would turn 45 degrees between shots, which is slightly easier to do. I don't recommend doing ten-shot circles, because of the difficulty of getting the pattern right. Occasionally a camera can do 6-shot or 4-shot circles with enough overlap, and in that case you'll be turning 60 or 90 degrees, respectively, between shots (not likely with a pocket camera).
• After you're done with the horizon circle, it is time to shoot the sky or the floor. Your pick. If there are moving clouds, you may want to shoot the sky now, so the light is not too different from that of the first circle. If there are people around who may have been in the first set of pictures, shoot the floor now.
• Let's say you want to shoot the sky. Hold your camera so it tilts upwards, but getting a piece of the picture you'd get in the level position. In my camera, this means I need to tilt it about 45 degrees. Holding the lens right above the floor spot and at the same level as before (which might mean that you'll lower the body a bit, shoot another circle using the same foot pattern as before. Be careful not to change the tilt of the camera as you do it.
• Repeat the process with the floor. This time you'll be tilting the camera downwards, which will cause the body to rise slightly so the lens remains always at the same height. Again, make sure you don't change the tilt as you turn around the spot. Don't worry about getting the marker in the pictures (you won't, unless your camera is amazingly wide-angle).
• Finish off with a straight-up and a straight-down picture (remove the marker for the down picture). Better yet, get two of each, with the camera turned 90 degrees between shots. These will be used to patch the poles of the panorama. In my camera, this adds up to a grand total of 40 pictures.

If you've read about panoramas before, you've probably noticed that I didn't say anything about exposure. The reason is that I'm assuming it is determined automatically, based on lighting conditions. The only thing you can do is watch out for sudden changes in exposure between adjacent pictures (like when you look at the edge of a building or a glass pane), and try to avoid them by shifting the aim slightly. If you can set manual exposure, turn around a few times before you start shooting, so as to find a setting that works both for light and dark areas, or needs little adjustment from picture to picture. The software can compensate for small changes in exposure, but it cannot do miracles.

As a sample, I give you the full series of pictures I took inside the church next to my house: St. Mary of the Angels, in Chicago. They were all shot in manual mode with identical exposure, automatic focus and everything else.

Processing is the other half of the work, but relax, because the trickiest part is over. When you finally get back home, get online and download the demo for PTGUI, which is the best panorama software in existence. There are others, too, but this one is heads and shoulders above the rest. While you're at it, download also the PTGUI version of the old Panorama Tools software, plus Smartblend and Autopano, which are all free. Install them in a folder you can find and open PTGUI. You want to open the tools-options-plugins screen, and point PTGUI to the place where you installed the other programs. Now you're ready to convert your scattered shots into a full-blown panorama.

Here's the workflow:

• Click the "Load images" button and direct the program to all the pictures you shot, including the end caps. PTGUI sometimes fails at getting the caps set up correctly, but you can always remove those pictures from the process later on. Now hit "open"
• The program should show you a row of thumbnails of the pictures you selected. If you shot from left to right, as I do, the pictures will line up nicely in each circle. Now hit "Align images"
• After some processing, the program will display a tentative version of the panorama, in a projection called "equirectangular" (you can choose a different one in the options), plus maybe some warning messages and a "control point assistant" box. PTGUI 8.02, with the picture series above, had a problem with the straight-down pictures, which appear smeared over the top of the scene, and the control point assistant confirms that it didn't find control points for them.
  • a little aside to talk about control points. PTGUI, like all other panorama stiching programs, matches adjacent pictures by finding shared patterns. The process can fail if a picture has little pattern (skies), or too regular pattern (floors and ceilings), or is out of focus (anything). It will also fail if there is no overlap between pictures, and in that case there is nothing we can do about it; this is why it is important to get the pattern right when shooting.
  • if a picture is singled out as not having enough control points, we can add some manually by opening the "control point" tab and navigating to the culprit and one that is next to it. PTGUI allows you to click on a placeof a picture, and then clicking on the same feature in another picture creates a link that aligns both pictures to one another. If you installed Autopano, you can also ask it to find you some matches ("control points" menu, third from the bottom), but careful because it often finds too many.
• The particular pictures that PTGUI had trouble with, in the example, have an irregular pattern, so it won't matter much if I don't align them just right. I go to the "panorama editor" window, where they are stuck on the ceiling, and drag them to the floor with the mouse (select the arrow icon on the upper left first). Then I hit "optimize" in the main window. PTGUI puts them in the wrong place once again, but the next time it gets the message and they are placed where they belong. The picture is a little crooked, so I hit the "straighten panorama" icon. Then I finish off the alignment of the columns (they should be vertical) by dragging the whole thing with the mouse in the panorama editor window.
• And that's it! The only thing left is saving the panorama. Click the "create panorama" tab, select the size (smaller for web, larger for off-line), and a place to save. You have the option of using a different blender (which handles the transitions between picture) at this point. Smartblend is often better and faster than the PTGUI built-in blender. The default file is a jpg, but you can also save it as a quicktime mov file, which is what I'm showing at the start of this article.

Have fun sharing the world with your friends!