How can you hide the tripod in a 360x180 spherical panorama?
Asked 3/6/2017
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When shooting a full spherical panorama (360x180), what camera or shooting technique can avoid showing the tripod, pano head, or the photographer’s hands in the final image? Is this usually solved in-camera, or by shooting and editing a separate nadir/straight-down patch?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
9y ago
2 Answers
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By "360 photography", I'm making the assumption that you want a spherical view (aka "photosphere").
The Panono 360 (https://www.panono.com) is a throwable camera taking a complete spherical image, suspended in the air. With this kind of "camera", no hand/foot and no tripod in view...
If you want something more classic, you can use a camera on a tripod for all your shoots and remove the tripod for the one looking down (manually holding the camera). It shouldn't be very tricky to align afterwards.
You might also try using no tripod. Unless you are making Gigapixels panorama, 360 views don't require hundreds of images. You may be surprised by the quality of hand-holded panorama, given a little practice.
If the ground allows it, you can also try the "delete and replace" feature of Photoshop (or other tool) to erase the image of the tripod.
Regarding hands, the technique don't put them in front of the camera might help. Of course being invisible could also be helpfull (same thing goes for your feet).
Originally by user26456. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user26456
9y ago
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Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Most 360x180 panoramas are made by shooting multiple images and stitching them, not by a single conventional shot. In practice, the tripod is usually removed with a combination of capture technique and post-processing.
A common method is to shoot the full pano on a tripod, then make one or two nadir shots (straight down), rotating 180° between them to capture as much clean ground as possible. After that, move or remove the tripod and shoot a clean plate of the area that was blocked. In editing, use masking/cloning to patch over the tripod area.
If you’re not making very high-resolution panoramas, handheld shooting can also work and avoids the tripod entirely, though it takes practice.
There are also specialized cameras designed to capture a full sphere with minimal support visible, including throwable or suspended designs, but for most photographers the standard solution is still tripod + nadir patch + retouching.
So: yes, it’s usually solved by technique and editing rather than a normal camera magically hiding the tripod.
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