From the course: Telling Your Story on the Web in 60 Seconds

Shooting a 360˚ photo with your smartphone

From the course: Telling Your Story on the Web in 60 Seconds

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Shooting a 360˚ photo with your smartphone

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- Let's start our exploration of panoramic and 360-degree photos with a smartphone. Now, I want to share with you some different pieces of advice to get better results. One of the first things I like to say is, consider using a tripod. [Instructor] Here, I have a simple adaptive tripod that allows me to mount the camera either vertically or horizontally, you just adjust the knob here and you can turn, but it's allowed it to go onto a small tripod. This is so much more stable. So, as we turn this here, the camera is just rock solid. Another thing to think about is locking down the exposure. Now, I'm not usually going to take a photo shoot here inside of the studio, but even outdoors, variations will occur as you pan around. [Instructor] But you see here, look at how things are really dark, so the camera opens up, and then as we turn around, the exposure starts to change. Well, that's because we're seeing different types of scenarios and lighting conditions. What's important is that we actually lock that down. So, I can press and hold here on the screen, and we'll get a little dialogue that says auto exposure and auto focus lock. By locking onto the subject that you want to focus on and set the exposure for. Now, as we turn the camera and take a series of photos, you'll notice that the exposure is going to stay locked throughout the scene. And that's good, letting some of the darker elements here fall into shadows as we take this behind the scenes photo of the video shoot today. That's pretty straightforward, but a lot of folks don't think about that. And as you go to stitch or blend the panorama together, you get some pretty weird results if the exposures vary greatly. Now, there are also some amazing 360-degree apps that work right on a smartphone and add-on cameras that you can plug in for shooting VR video. But let me show you one of my favorite for just capturing cool 360-degree photos. [Instructor] It's called Occipital, and it's pretty easy to use. Now, what it does is as you look around here, you'll see that it starts to create a 360-degree cylinder. What's important is you keep the camera at a consistent position in your body and instead, tilt and move your body, and try not to move the elbows too much. [Instructor] So let me show you this here, I'll click Start, and now, I just start to pan my body, and it will begin to overlap. Continue to pan and go in circles, and it will stitch together. You can start to tilt up, for example, if you want to see more of the ceiling, and it does a real time, 360-degree map. Now, since it's a mobile phone, it may not be perfect, and you'll get better results if you're not in smaller indoor settings. For example, that bad seam there on the desk. But if you're in a general outdoor environment, this works really well. And what happens is, is when you're all set and click Done, it will turn this into a 360-degree or a partially interactive image if you just want to see some of the scene, and the viewer can look up or look down. This works tremendously better in an outdoor environment when you're not so close to a desk or a surface, but this allows you to capture the world. I'll show you a couple that I've done here. For example, this is Point Udall in the U.S. Virgin Islands. And as you can see, the viewer gets a great idea of what it's like to be somewhere, and it makes it easy to tour. When they're ready, they just tap the Share button and they can go directly to social media. You can decide whether or not to share the GPS data and tap Log In, create an account if needed, and then the content will be shared. The file will be uploaded directly to Facebook. You'll see in the bottom there, Uploaded, when the file is ready. Now, when uploaded to Facebook, users can actually pan and look around right on their mobile phones, or if they tap and go into a more immersive environment here, they see the scene or they can just use their finger to drag up and down, and look around, and see the environment. All right, pretty cool technology. Let's go on and explore a dedicated VR camera though, which might make it a little bit easier to get more accurate results.

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