There are at least three ways to create a 360° panorama: You can use a panoramic camera which rotates and creates a single image in one go; or you can use a fish-eye lens and take two pictures; or use a wide-angle lens and take about a dozen overlapping pictures.

The first method gives excellent results (look at Virtual Tour Lovre on our links page) but is far too expensive for most people and the second method gives the poorest image quality because a lot less image data is captured on two fish-eye images than on a dozen pictures. This is not so important for lo-res web use. More important is that a company called IPIX - Internet Pictures Corporation - incredible enough has got a patent for using fish-eye lenses to create spherical panoramas. They now spend a lot of time filing lawsuits against people who are making panoramas with fish-eye lenses and thus infringing their patent.

The third way - making panoramas by stitching together overlapping photos - is probably the method used by most panographers and this is also the way all QTVR and Java VR movies on this site are made.

A Nikon Coolpix 990 with a wide-angle converter is used for the pictures - about 10-12 in portrait format for each panorama. I used a tripod in the beginning but now I work with a hand-held camera - this makes it much easier to make quick and un-noticed panoramas in crowded places or in places where tripods are forbidden. The camera is used in manual mode and I rely entirely on existing light sources - no extra flash neither indoors nor outdoors at night.

A freeware program called ColorCastFX for Digital Cameras from Mediachance is used to enhance the colors and brighten up the photos. (This program is also incredibly useful for under-exposed photos - some of mine were almost black but could still be used after having been treated with ColorCastFX.) The enhanced images are then combined to panoramas with PanaVue ImageAssembler software. The resulting panoramic image (about 75 megabytes big in BMP format) is checked for minor stitching errors in Jasc Paint Shop Pro 8 (I also have Photoshop 6 but prefer Paint Shop Pro) and reduced in size to about 5 megabytes before it goes back to PanaVue ImageAssembler to be wrapped, cropped and finally saved both as a Quicktime VR movie and as a jpg panorama for the Java version.