360 - A walk in the park?

So, I bought a 360 camera. Not top of the range but good enough to produce more than acceptable results at an affordable price. The “MiSphere” arrived a couple of weeks ago and, with fifty plus years of conventional photography behind me, I hadn’t realised how steep the learning curve was going to be. Old dogs and new tricks is a phrase that immediately came to mind.

It’s not so much the age of the dog (though that’s undeniable) but the number of new tricks involved. Starting from the most basic - how do you hold a camera that can see ‘everything’? Without taking evasive action, every shot can be a ‘selfie’ (I’ve always hated selfies). If the sun is out, it’s in your picture - with all the attendant issues that sun-strike produces - especially for fisheye lenses.

And those things are just for starters, wait until you get your photos into the digital darkroom; that’s when the fun really begins. If you thought that Lightroom and Photoshop were more than enough, then think again - you’ll need to master spherical stitching, tools heavily reliant on the JPG format and EXIF injection so that your 360s show up properly on the web.

And don’t get me started on 360 video …

For an old photographer, 360 photography is fun; if only because it’s like starting out on the photographic journey all over again. Yes, you still need the old photography knowledge but applied in ways that hadn’t previously been relevant. Going digital (back in the 2000s) was a big change, but going 360 is a much larger conceptual leap.

A lot of published 360 photography focuses on the weird and wacky, like ‘tiny planet’ shots (above) that can include a complete environment or table of dinner guests. But 360 photography opens up other possibilities, like the selection of multiple pictures from one 360 photo - almost an ‘after the fact’ composition tool. All three pictures on this page, for example, come from a single 360 photo. (An art filter was applied to the third image.)

If you had ever felt that your photographs were getting old and staid, 360 photography could well be the jolt that gets you thinking afresh about taking pictures.