[RichG]

I think the best results for the money can still be had via the reflective sphere solution. Obviously this gives you a light probe where you need a spherical image for Maxwell but there's a great, cheap plugin called Flexify which will unwrap your light probe into all sorts of configurations and gives a very creditable spherical unwrap.

http://www.flamingpear.com/flexify.html

I have a Gigapan Epic for automatically shooting all the tiles necessary for a spherical panorama and I'd always turn to that for a high quality backplate but if I need hdr info to match the lighting on a shoot, there's generally no time for that. They don't want to stop the main shoot for an hour while I fire off 30 or more shots and all the exposures I need. But I can get in with the chrome ball and knock out 10 or more brackets in a few minutes.

As for panoramic software, I did a huge panoramic shoot recently and I've always used Stitcher but it's getting a bit long in the tooth and has been bought out by Autodesk so I looked at the alternatives. PTGui is very nice, simple to use but for power and accuracy you can't beat Autopano Pro. It takes a while to understand the workflow but it stitches together where everything else fails, I can't recommend it highly enough.

[Burnum]

where does one get such a Sphere? I assume it can be mounted to a c-stand or something?
How do you shoot it to make sure you get everything you want without you in it when done?

[RichG]

where does one get such a Sphere? I assume it can be mounted to a c-stand or something?
How do you shoot it to make sure you get everything you want without you in it when done?

I think they are called gazing balls in the US. Mine is a garden ornament from the Conran shop!
I always shoot with as long a lens as possible but don't forget there's always the clone tool too.

[big K]

I'm currently looking for a way to hack my EOS 350D, so I can get more than 3 bracket steps.

if you manage to do this, please, let me know. i am very interested in this. as i am always very disappointed about the bracketing in Canon cameras, which do a good job otherwise.

[Mr Whippy]

where does one get such a Sphere? I assume it can be mounted to a c-stand or something?
How do you shoot it to make sure you get everything you want without you in it when done?

I think they are called gazing balls in the US. Mine is a garden ornament from the Conran shop!
I always shoot with as long a lens as possible but don't forget there's always the clone tool too.

I bought a chrome ball and to be honest the HDRi that I ended up with was average at best. You need a very long lens for you to be small, and long lenses are pretty slow, and suffer with the tiniest changes in camera position, so you really want a 400mm focal length, and a remote device, or enough automatic brackets to grab everything you want hands off.
There were also millions of little scratches and slight distortions on the surface, despite this being from a bearing manufacturer!

If you get a good ball, it will need to be treated very carefully and looked after with great care, to preserve the quality it may allow if you do use it for reflection map use...

It would be fine for lighting, but not for reflections really AND you still have you in the pictures...



I'd prefer to get a decent fisheye lens and even make a decent tripod head to rotate the camera about the focal point on the camera (a friend did this in one evening with a friend and it worked well for lots of QT VR stuff)... that way you get decent images that need little editing (to remove you), are good for lighting, and ALSO good for reflection use (better detail/resolution)

Ultimately, these days, it seems just going straight in for a proper high-res 360/180 panorama in HDR is best achieved with a camera on a decent head with a fisheye using as few stitches as possible.
If you could rent a 5D say (full frame) and a fisheye, you might get away with 5 images for a full pano, and have enough control over bracketing to just fire it 5 times. Point 1/3rd, fire off 8 exposures, next 1/3rd, fire off 8 bracketed exposures, last third, then an up and down.

Very fast. OK, not cheap, but then you have the kind of stuff you can sell, and hugely reduce time back at the workstation tidying it up and making it workable

Dave

[Burnum]

the panosaurus is so cheep, it saved me the time to build my own. ($75) And it lets you shoot more than just 1 row. I don't have a fish eye yet, and the images stich in PTGui Pro great, so far. All 200+ of them... <Gulp> Yeah, I need a wider lens!!!

it's all about getting the parallax out of the shots, and shooting remote so you don't bump things during a set.