How can you make a 360 at night with a DSLR and a tripod ? Here are some tips on how to use your DSLR and a regular tripod to capture some of the magic light at dusk and at night.
Equipment
- DSLR
- Wide-angle fisheye lens like the Samyang 8mm
- Tripod
Software
- Hugin - a free software to stitch your panoramic photos
- PTGui - a very user friendly powerful stitching software - paid license to download
- Lightroom or Photoshop - good for editing shadows and highlights but not necessary
Steps:
1. Make sure your tripod can hold the camera in portrait mode so as to reduce how much you have to adjust your camera. The goal is to take photos while rotating your camera on the tripod so you cover the whole scene while ensuring adequate overlap between shots. The overlap is used by the software to know how to stitch the photos by recognizing the same patterns from one photo to the next. So, it is better to go with lots of overlap to make sure that the software can overlay the photos properly.
2. Put your camera on manual mode with RAW photo setting. Set the aperture for the brightest setting such as f-3.5. This will allow for the most light to reach the sensor. Set the ISO to around 800. This will provide enough light sensitivity to capture the scene but not so high that it will be overly grainy. Now, use the exposure setting in your camera to choose the shutter speed. The speed may be around 20 seconds under low light conditions. Set the shutter timer to like 2 seconds to avoid moving the camera while you take the photo. Any slight movement at 20 second exposure will make the image all blurry.
3. Once the settings are final, start taking pictures. Start with the lower layer by pointing your camera down until you see the spot under the middle of the tripod in the bottom of the frame. Take the first photo. Next, rotate the camera on the tripod for the second photo making sure you are getting 30-20% overlap from the last photo and take a picture. Go all around taking photos until you reach the starting point. Then, tilt the camera upwards so the top of the frame reaches the sky at a point straight up from your location. Going a bit farther is OK as the stitching software will overlap the sky. Then follow the same procedure as with the downward shots making sure you get good overlap between shots.
4. You can now download your photos and process them in Lightroom for uniform exposure. This is where having RAW shots come in handy as you will have more options for processing. After processing you will import them into Hugin or PTGui stitching software for the processing into 360 images that you can upload to Google Maps.
The flattened version of a night time 360
The embedded version of the same photo in Street View
