One more 'planet' picture

Just one more from me today. On top of St. Catherine's Hill near Winchester is the MizMaze, a turf maze.




For those asking how these are done, here's the sequence:

1. Make a normal pano. Use a fixed white balance, fixed focus and manual exposure. 360 degrees is best. If you want the ground you are standing on in the shot then one row of shots will need to have your feet in. This one is three rows of 18 shots with the Sigma 10-20 on 10mm. There is one low row with my feet in and the trees near the top, one row with the horizon in the middle, plus one row with the trees near the bottom - mostly sky. Make sure you overlap all the shots to make the stitching work and try to rotate the camera around one point.

2. I stitched the shots using the free Microsoft ICE. Fully automatic.

3. The resulting pano will be quite wide, so then in Photoshop use the 'Image size' dialog to change it so it is square, do this by making the two numbers the same and unchecking the 'constrain proportions' box.
You should now have a rather large square image, this was over 300 meg.

4. Invert the square image.

5. Use Photoshop's 'Filter', 'Distort', 'Polar Coordinates' and choose 'rectangular to polar'.

The result is like above, you'll need to do some cloning to remove your feet or tripod legs from the centre and maybe tidy up any bad joins. The sky could be removed and replaced by space or something like that.

Have fun!



Did I say just one more? This is addictive - here's the planet where I live:

Tennis balls with attitude 1st one is a stand out.

It really does look like a tennis ball with a mohawk!

Number 1 is cool, the green ball works better than the carpark and the sky is much better. Reminds me of that crazy man who did one of these over a 24 hour period so you could see 24 suns/moons at different heights.