Building My Own Planet Using A DSLR (Original Photography)

It's been a while since I've gone out on a good photography adventure that doesn't involve cars, and the need to do something creative had been lurking for a few days. And when you have a need, what do you do? Feed it, of course.

Well, what you're looking at below is the result of me "feeding the need" - a 360 panorama created from 23 individual photos (yes, 23), that I shot one-by-one with my Canon 6D. I know that tools exist on drones now that can create these, as well as cellphones, but I prefer to do things the old-school, proper way. Needless to say, doing things this way takes much longer and a huge amount of processing power, but the results are worth it.

These types of photos are commonly referred to as "little planets". I'm sure you can guess why.

The location was nothing particularly special - it was actually just by the ending point of my running route, and I happened to have my camera waiting in the car from a previous shoot. I originally tried to do a long exposure, but the sunset wasn't turning out as spectacular as I hoped it would, so I decided to go for broke with a 360 panorama instead.

Here’s the image as a regular panorama without any real editing, showing the full 360 degree view. To make the actual “planet” took a few more steps in Photoshop, but perhaps I’ll share those steps as a tutorial on Steemit if anyone is interested?

To see the exact location on Google Maps, take a look here.

Camera	Canon 6D
Lens	Tokina 10-17mm fisheye
Processing	Photoshop CC

DISCLAIMER: All photos and writing are my own original work.