Neil Creek – Photographer

This time of year, everyone inevitably takes photos of their christmas trees. I thought I’d do something different:

Quicktime required – People reading this in the RSS feed will need to visit the post to see the panorama.

This is a 360 degree panorama, created by photographing one of the reflective christmas baubles hanging from our tree. The reason everything looks so blurry is because the bauble is not a completely smoothe mirror surface. The panorama is nonetheless a rather unusual perspective, seeing the room as if one was sitting in the tree along with the decorations.

Here’s the parnoramic image “unwrapped”:

I achieved this panorama by taking a close-up photo of the bauble from two different locations, then unwarping and stitching them in PTGui. Why two? Because a single view of the bauble doesn’t cover the whole scene, you can’t see what’s directly behind it. Also, two photos allow me to edit myself and the camera out of the photo, and each shot fills in the gap created in the other.

These are the original photos used to create the pano:

The black areas are where I edited myself out. These are transparent in the working files, which are stored in TIFF format. If you’d like to read a tutorial about the details of how to achieve this kind of photo, there’s a nice little tutorial here.