How To Creat A World Shot

Equipment Needed:

• Camera
• Tripod (highly recommended)
• Remote (highly recommended)
• Computer (plenty of RAM)
• Photoshop

Of all of my post to Flickr I have got the most questions about my world shots. I can still remember the first time I saw one; my jaw hit the floor. I was blown away that that was even possible. So after several request I've put together a brief but hopeful thorough guide on how to make a "world shot" from start to finish.

Farm World

Things To Think About Before Taking Your Shots:

To do a world shot I recommend using a tripod and a remote. Essentially to do a world shot you need to take a 360 degrees pano (translation: take a pano where your start photo and your final photo overlap) shot. Be sure before you start that you are far enough away from all objects, like a poll, tree building, etc that you can actually get all of it in your frame. The bottom 25% of the pano will be the center (which gets distorted) of your world. The top 25% will be the sky of the world, and the middle 50% will be what makes up what you can see of the world. So keeping that in mind you can plan or site out where to set up to start taking your 360 degrees pano.

In case you didn’t listen in geometry class 360 degrees is a complete circle. I love when people are talking about doing the exact opposite and they call it doing a 360, when actually that would just be a 180. OK I diverted to a rant, back on course now.

How To Take The Shot

You don’t have to use a tripod, but I highly recommend it, as it will help you in minimizing the skewing of your pano when you have Photoshop put your shots into a pano. So now that you’ve found your location for your shot, put your camera on a tripod, preferably your tripod, if you steal someone’s tripod they might not let you finish with your shots, or at least ask first.

I like to shoot with a remote as it helps to eliminate or minimize any movement in the camera or vibration, which could throw things off, especially if you are shooting in low light. I also shoot in Aperture Priority Mode (AV-Canon & A-Nikon). You want the shot to be somewhat evenly exposed, as the shot will come around to meet together. I know what you are thinking and I too was tempted to shoot in full Manual mode as I thought that would be best, but trust me it’s not. While parts of the sky will perfectly exposed, 180 from that spot will either be way dark or way too bright.

Take a few test shots to get your settings and then start making your 360 pano. In making the 360 pano (or any pano for that matter) be sure to overlap by about 20-25%. I usually take my pano’s in Live View so I don’t risk moving the camera while on the tripod anymore than I have to. I rotate the camera on the tripod (using the control arm on the tripod, not physically touching the camera or picking up the tripod and moving it) in a clockwise manner. I pick an object about 20% in from the right from the first shot and then rotate till it’s about 20% in from the left, then I take another shot and so on. Be sure you get a full 360 degrees, so if you are wondering if you got enough take another shot. The world shot at the top consisted of 11 shots. I shoot my pano’s in portrait layout to ensure I get what I want in the pano even after Photoshop skews the pano.

How To Process The Shots

I use Photoshop and Bridge to process my files. I opened all of the shots into Camera Raw using Bridge and Select All files and apply any adjustments. Then I clicked Done. I then selected all the shots in Bridge and went to Tools => Photoshop => Photomerge…

This will bring up a dialog box in Photoshop, it chooses Auto for the layout by default, just go with that and click OK. Warning here; I have 11 shots at 15.1 mega pixels and my old laptop only has 2 GB of RAM so if you are in the similar boat, be prepared to wait a while! Photoshop does its think and finally you’ll get a pano. As eluded to before Photoshop will skew the pano a bit so you’ll need to Crop it. In cropping the pano you also need to know that it’s crucial that crop the far left and the far right of the pano at exactly the same point as they will be merged together.

360 degree pano after being cropped.

 

From there you need to resize the pano. You’ll need the height and width of the shot to be the same (making it a square). I didn’t need the shot to be 100 inches wide so I chose the height of 18 and the width of 18. Make sure you have Constrain Proportions unchecked, otherwise you’ll never get it to be the same size. Yeah I know it looks really funny at this point, stay with me.

The pano has been changed to a square format.

Next you’ll need to rotate the shot 180 degrees. To do that go to: Image => Rotate => 180. Now time for the last step, yep we finally made it to the last step. Go to: Filter => Distort => Polar Coordinates and make sure you choose the Rectangular to Polar option and click OK. There you go you’ve got your world shot.

I said that that’s the last step but odds are you’ll need to work with your Clone Stamp and the Healing Tool to smooth out the line where the two ends came together.

There you go now you've got all the information you need to know to do your own world shot. Be sure to put a link in the comments below so I can checkout your world shots.

Note: After I got my world put together that was posted at the top, I then added some additional post processing.

Another example of a world shot I've done. This one brought home a blue ribbon in a regional photography contest.

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