Little KAIRA Planet

Recently, we wrote about how to generate a panorama from 360 images of one degree field of view. However, we can play this game some more. These panoramas are 360°, which means that their outer (left and right) edges match exactly. Therefore, one can use an image manipulation program such as Gimp to create what is knows as "little planet" images. The name stems from the fact that these landscape panoramas are fully encircled by sky and thus look a bit like a planet, alas in the wrong scale.

Here's the little-planet version of the sunny KAIRA panorama, which in addition was rotated in order to have Saana at the top like in the image above. The star-shaped shades are due to the automatic exposure of the GoPro time-lapse camera.

The key ingredient to making these kind of images is Gimp's distortion filter "polar co-ordinates."

Photos and editing: Thomas Ulich.

A related and more explicit description is available on the MiVyoo blog.

KAIRA Egg-Timer Panoramas

Previously, we wrote about a 360° panoramic time-lapse film we made using an egg timer. For the photo above, we wanted to combine all 360 images (one per degree of roation) into one large panorama. This meant to cut from every photo a tiny narrow centre slice and to combine these into one large image. If you look carefully, you can make out the stripes.

On the next day, the weather was much nicer, and we repeated the egg-timer photography. However, due to the GoPro fully automatic exposure settings, and the variable lighting due to fast moving clouds and the bright Sun, it was not possible to make a nice pan-lapse out of these photos, and as you can see, the stripiness is much more pronounced in this image, even though the blue sky is very nice of course.

You can click on the above images to get larger versions.

Original photos and panoramas: Thomas Ulich.

A related article was published on the MiVyoo blog.