To make a pano like this doesn't require any special skill - it just involves a bit of physical labour.

First I got a fisheye lens with a 180° angle of view to bring down the number of pictures. Then I got 20 meter of strong line and two pulleys (blocks). A panoramic head in aluminium that I had made earlier for my tripod came to good use - the only thing I had to make was a turning mount for the line. And since the camera will be out of reach when the pictures are taken, I sent for a wireless remote shutter from Hongkong.

Of course you don't want the line to be visible in the pano, so you first have to mount it in a north- south direction when you take the images to the east and to the west. Then you remount it in east-west direction for the north and south facing images.

The fisheye lens angle-of-view is 180°, but since most digital cameras don't have a full-size image sensor, it can only capture about 120°. I prefer a 50% image overlap, which means that I have to haul in the camera and turn it 60° for each image. So the greatest challenge lies in getting the camera into the exact same position for all images. The smallest parallax error will show and create a lot of fine tuning work when stiching, so there will be much running back and forth to adjust the camera position for each picture. Small differences in pitch, yaw or roll, however, don't matter - they are automatically compensated for by the stiching software.

The software I use for my panos are:

• Panotools library with PTGui for stiching the images.
• Photoshop for all fine tuning.
• Pano2QTVR for converting to cubic images.
• Flash Panorama Player 2.2 to create and view the Flash pano object.

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