My 360 degree hiking and scenic photographs webpage

How the photos were created

These photos were created with my regular 35mm Nikon SLR camera and I used a 50mm lens to shoot them. The photos were created by me first selecting an initial point on the terrain to begin taking the pictures. I then turned the camera vertically and aligned the view so that I would get the maximum amount of terrain in the photographs. That meant that the camera was actually angled slightly down from the horizon.

I then took a picture of the terrain. After taking the picture, I would find and remember some terrain feature on the right side of the picture such as a snowfield edge or interesting rock. Then I moved the camera horizontally until I had moved the noted terrain feature to the left side of the frame. I then took another picture. I did make sure that there was some overlap between the pervious frame and the current frame. Again I noted some feature on the right side of the frame and moved the camera to its new position. I continued this process picture taking and horizontal movement until I had moved all the way around in a complete circle. This process usually would require 16 frames of film to complete.

After the film is processed, I scanned each frame of film into the computer using my film scanner. Then I opened up each individual image into Photoshop and I created a very large blank image that will contain the eventual 360 degree composite image. At this point it is basically just a matter to copying each of the individual terrain images into the large composite image and aligning the new image to the ever growing composite image.

More coming...

Last Updated: October 31, 2003
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