I have been doing a lot of 360 pano’s over the last few years and recently purchased a new 360 camera to do a lot of my ground panos since most of my earlier ones are from my drone.
I recently went back to a the abandon train tunnels off of old 40 near Donner Lake and tested out the new Ricoh Theta Z1 360 camera to see what results I can get from a single 360 camera system instead of a full blown DSLR setup with custom pano head (which will currently always provide better results).
Below is a shot taken from the Z1 using the Dual FishEye Plugin, which is pretty amazing and I love the fact out of all the 360 cameras I have seen this is the only one that allows developers to write custom plugins for. Nevertheless this was shot with the plugin enabled at HDR +/- 4 exposure which takes a number of DNG files, then stacks them together creating 1 single 16 big DNG file which can then be processed in Lightroom or Photoshop and stitched with the Theta Stitcher or my preferred program PTGui.
A few years back I took my drone into these tunnels and created a 3d scan of this section which you can view here. You can definitely see some difference in the graffiti on the walls from a few years ago.
If you would like to know how I did any of this just hit me up in the comments below!
Current Things used to do the 360 Photo Pano.
- Ricoh Theta Z1
- Dual FishEye Plugin for the Z1
- Adobe Lightroom
- PTGui
