Recently I changed to a new phone, and together with it I also got the Gear VR headset. So of course I wanted to try it out also with my own photos, but I did not really had any. So today I went to get some new 360 shots, and here is one of them. You can look around in it a little further down in this post, or if you have a VR headset, you can download the source image and view it directly.

For the Gear VR, you just have to:
– connect your phone to a PC
– find the Oculus folder in the root of the phone storage
– create a 360Photos folder, if it’s not there
– copy the photo into the folder
– put the phone into the headset, and open the Oculus 360 Photos app
– choose See all from the first selection and the My photos from the second
– choose the 360Photos folder and choose the photo you want to view

I have no idea how to do it in other VR headsets, as I only have the Gear VR, but I think it will be similar.

Here you can see the whole 360 panorama, created from 4 shots (8mm fish-eye lens). Edited in Lightroom, PTgui, Photoshop and Pano2VR.

And here you can look around in it. Just use your mouse to drag the view around and use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out.

Tomorrow I’m off to a 3 weeks long trip which will take me to Bordeaux, Paris and Amsterdam. This time, it’s the first time that I will try to edit photos on the go and update the blog right with a photo I took during the day. So wish me luck that I manage to keep up with everything I need to do while there, and also with the blog. And of course, let’s hope my internet connection will be fast enough :)

And for today, another try with the 17mm TSE lens. This is a 3 shot vertorama, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Technique: Photoshop Edit, Number of exposures: 3, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones MkIII Adapter, Lens: Canon 17mm F4 TSE, Focal length: 17mm, Aperture: 9, Middle exposure time: 8s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.135867, 17.128207

Another shot taken with the 17mm tilt-shift lens. This one is a vertorama from 3 exposures (center, shifted down, shifted up). It’s crazy how much you can get with this lens, and how easy is to make a panorama. Since one does not need to move the camera at all, the pictures just fit together almost perfectly. I did a lot of panoramas recently, and now it looks like there will be even more of them :)

And to show you the difference, I’m including the original middle exposures, which is the same as if you used a normal 17mm lens. You can see how much more you get just by shifting the lens.

Technique: Photoshop Edit, Number of exposures: 3, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones MkIII Adapter, Lens: Canon 17mm F4 TSE, Focal length: 17mm, Aperture: 9, Middle exposure time: 25s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.139465, 17.104995

Yesterday I got myself a new lens, the Canon 17mm F4 TSE and of course I had to try it out right away. For those not familiar with this lens, it’s a specialized tilt shift lens, great for architecture, interior and panorama shots. I will do more articles about this lens, as I also want to do a guide on shifting and tilting, but for today, few of my first observations after few hours of use:

– great sharpness
– the area you can cover is crazy big, this is one really wide lens (if you shift)
– quite easy to use, but the knobs could have been a bit bigger
– looks like its easier to catch lens flares, but that is not a big surprise
– the light leaks are quite visible in longer exposures, will have to experiment if this is only when shifted, and look for some nice cover for the lens

So my first impressions of it, are that I’m really happy with the purchase, will see how it works out on my next trip :)

This is a 4 shot pano (I did the horizontal shift to get three shots, and then rotated the lens and did one more vertical shift to get the top of the castle, see first comment for a merged panorama without photoshop edits). This ended up as a 75Mpix image after cropping. That is really a lot. Btw. the towers are not the same size, the left one is bigger, thats why it looks different.

I’m including a shot of just the panorama before photoshop edits. As you can see, the corners are missing, as you cant shift into them. I filled them in with Photoshop. Was not that hard as it was just the sky :)

Technique: Photoshop Edit, Number of exposures: 4, Camera Model: Sony a7R + Metabones MkIII Adapter, Lens: Canon 17mm F4 TSE, Focal length: 17mm, Aperture: 9, Middle exposure time: 3.2s, ISO: 100, Tripod used: yes, Location: 48.141558, 17.100143

I’m a little low on new photos right now, so here is one more of the lights on the new Old bridge. But I’m currently planing a trip, so there should be new photos from many interesting places very soon :)

For this shot I took three exposures, but due to soft earth under the tripod, they were not properly aligned. So I ended with just using a single exposure, which I overexposed to get the detail in the bridge shadows, and underexposed to get the detail in the pillars. It worked out quite nicely. All edits done in Lightroom and Photoshop.