How To: Circular Panorama Tutorial & Examples

As a photographer, I’ve long been interested in panoramas. I think they help extend the limitations of my camera by more completely capturing landscapes in a manner that provides an altered or distorted perspective. As a predominately digital photographer that’d rather put work on the web than deal with the tedium and cost of printing, I’ve always struggled with being able to effectively view and share my work within the confines of a computer screen.

Several years ago, I stumbled upon a technique that solved many of these problems and that presented my pieces in a radically different way. The result, which I’ll term a circular panorama here, involves applying polar coordinates to a 360 degree panorama. Since first discovering the technique, I’ve experimented and refined it with extraordinary success.

The process of making one of these panoramas is pretty simple and can be completed with varying levels of precession, as detailed below.

1. Choose a location. I use a 10-22 mm lens and typically shoot at the wider end of the lens. The size of the space can vary widely. I’ve successfully shot tiny dorm rooms and huge athletic fields. More than anything else, I’ve found for aesthetics, it’s helpful to choose a scene that contains rich geometry and symmetry. Taking the picture in the center of a room/field or at the intersection of a sidewalk/road usually does the trick.

2. Shoot a 360 degree panorama. I take all of these with a tripod equipped with a modified head that allows me rotate the camera around its focal point. Having this type of head isn’t as important as using a tripod, but it helps to ensure the images are seamlessly combined into the initial panorama. I usually take 9 photos in my camera’s portrait orientation, rotating it 40 degrees for each picture.

3. Merge your photos into a panorama. I use Photoshop’s Photomerge tool (File > Automate > Photomerge), although there’s also specialized panorama software available to achieve the same result. I’ve found the Photomerge’s cylindrical layout option to work best.

4. Crop the result. To get the two ends of the final product to line up correctly, it’s important to crop the left and right edges at the same point. If the panorama wasn’t shot on a level plane, it may also be necessary to rotate it. Varying the cropped height of your initial panorama can change the result’s emphasis and create some pretty interesting variations.

5. Flip the panorama upside-down and apply Photoshop’s polar coordinations filter. Flipping the image is optional, but I prefer the result when it’s applied.

6. Adjust the resulting image’s width to match its height. You’ll likely need to uncheck “Constrain Proportions.” That’s it!

I really like these circular panoramas because the technique radically distorts even the most familiar scenes, forcing viewers to reconceptualize their notions of space and view these scenes in an entirely different manner. I find the the resulting panoramas very aesthetically appealing and often almost magical in nature.

Included below is the first circular panorama I shot. It was later featured on the cover of Pomona Colleges 2007-2008 Student Handbook. To its right is the same scene (Pomona’s football field) shot on a sunny day.

Later, I experimented with the technique in one of my photography classes inside and at night, again with great results. An earlier post of mine discusses the final project of this class, which heavily utilized the technique. Here are two samples from that class. The first is of a Pomona College academic quad. The second features the interior of a friend’s dorm room.

Most recently, I revisited the technique as part of my work for my current photography class while seeking to develop a more complete portfolio of these images. A full gallery of my circular panoramas can be viewed here. I’ve also included a few additional samples below.