
360° Photography
The creative approach to capturing the world around you
Like any other type of photography, 360º requires a combination of technical skill and creative choice. The photograph is always an interpretation of what things really look like to the naked eye. In real life, when you turn your head, your brain processes light, depth and focus in a very dynamic way. A truly successful panoramic photograph gives the impression of what we see naturally while showing the photographer’s interpretation of it.
Tools and techniques
There are many techniques available for capturing 360 images and video. You probably have the ability to make a panoramic image on your own mobile phone. You can even shop online for a seemingly high spec 360° camera for less than €500. Simply comparing specifications is deceptive. To achieve professional looking results it’s important to understand what the real issues are in shooting high quality 360°.
What is 360º?
Panoramic images wrap around the viewer. They are generally not meant to be seen all at once but framed by a window. Much like the way our eyes take in only part of what surrounds us. It’s usually possible then to rotate your view to look in other directions and see what is normally out of eyeshot.
There are two basic types of 360° image – cylindrical and spherical. Mobile phones often generate cylindrical images where the top and the bottom of the panorama are missing. Spherical panoramas can be stored in a variety of ways – equirectanglar where the sphere is stretched out into a 2×1 image and Cubic where it is cut into flat planes.

Cameras for 360º photography

Instant or Stitched?
There are two very different ways of capturing 360 images – Instantaneously using a camera with more than one lens or by taking a series of photographs and then joining them together seamlessly (Stitching).
If the subject of the photograph is not moving or can be captured over a short period of time then taking a series of photographs is possible. Otherwise a camera with more than one lens is used.

Multi-Lens 360º Cameras
One shot purpose-built 360 cameras are widely available. They can feature anything from 2 to 100 lenses. Usually the process of joining the images that comes from these lenses is done automatically to create a seamless 360° panoramic image. There are some fundamental issues which limit the performance of this sort of cameras. The lens and the sensor that receives the image from the lens are usually much smaller than on a professional SLR camera. The arrangement of the lenses and sensors makes truly accurate 360 images impossible to achieve. In many cases this is not apparent unless the camera is close to objects in the photograph.

When to use an SLR camera
To achieve the highest quality photograph two things are vital – a good lens and a good digital sensor. The quality of these items on a professional single lens reflex camera is far above anything you can find in an all-in-one 360° camera. Not out of failure, but simply because the physical space available on a one-shot camera is much less.
It doesn’t mean, however, that you can use an SLR for 360º photography all the time – in some situations this isn’t possible. For example when there isn’t enough space to put the camera in position or when the subject of the photograph is moving quickly. In the situations we will use a multiple lens one-shot 360 camera. It provides a relatively high resolution but the possibilities for postproduction are limited.

360º Video
Capturing moving images in 360° is usually only possible with a multi lens camera. There are a wide range of 360 video cameras that can offer very high resolution. This is usually achieved by having many lenses and sensors in the same camera. These hi-res camras are very effective for outdoor photography but quite limited when the subject of the photograph is very close because problems will begin to appear in the stitching of the separate images.
The other issue which is very important with 360 video is how to watch it. Streaming high resolution 360 video is hugely data intensive. It requires a very powerful computer or a very wide bandwidth. Currently YouTube maximum resolution is 4K. So watching any higher resolution video online is not really available to mainstream users.
Shooting 360º
The initial stages of building an Insite require skilled operation of specialised hardware and software by experienced technicians. Some of our clients have dedicated VR departments – in this case as we are open to collaborate in the more technical part of the process, but generally we provide photography and world building as a service.
In the long term we hope to make more of the in-house process available to normal users. The current barriers to this are – the limitations of photographic hardware, indoor measurement systems and automated image grading systems.
Capturing the environment

On Location
The first step to capturing the location is to get an idea of the space in advance through maps and photographs and then roughly plan what needs to be shot. Often locations are difficult to reach or dangerous. This is why we make these trainings virtual in the first place. The rule of thumb for preparation for a location shoot is to make it look as you want it to be in the photographs and to consider that the camera will see in every direction.

360º with a single lens camera
Using a full format digital camera to capture high quality images requires a series of steps. We shoot a series of high resolution images from exactly the same position but a different rotation. Normally this means four directions at 90° to each other. Each one of those angles will often be bracketed for different light levels, so in effect one panoramic image can be made from 20 still images or more.
Post production
Often what makes a photograph look really professional is post processing – how the originally captured image is digitally enhanced to improve its appearance, or give it a particular stylistic tone. This is both a creative and a technical challenge which requires intention, experience and specialised digital tool sets.
In the case of 360º there is the added challenge of seemlessly stitching together images and ensuring that nothing looks either too dark or too bright as the viewpoint rotates.
Stitching images together
Any 360° photograph is made from more than one image which has been joined together. The process of joining images together and blending the overlapping areas is called stitching.
If you take a photograph in exactly the same position focal point and rotate your camera in theory the overlapping elements will blend perfectly together. The reality is that lenses are not perfect and any minor distortions will create blending issues which need to be corrected.
Even the tools for blending and stitching images have become more intelligent over the past 10 years, what’s really important is the source material. These images below show for 90° views which are stitched together to make the image underneath.



Colour grading
The colour of the light in a photograph affects the way the colour of the objects in the space appears. Electric lights have a yellow colour to them while daylight is slightly blue. Our brains are excellent at appreciating the colour of light so that we can tell the real colour of objects that we see.
The challenge to make colours look real and also to add creative styling to them is what makes professional photographers into creative interpreters of the subjects they record. Below is an example of how the image recorded differs from what it looks like after it has been graded. To achieve these kinds of effects requires a lot of different tools such as calibrated monitors, specialist software and powerful computers to process is very high resolution images.