My 360° photo journey - Part 1

Language: English flag English
Published: 16 August 2020
Length: 3 minutes (616 words)

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All parts of the journey: 1 2

My 360° photography journey started in August 2018 just a few days before a trip with my father to Iceland, which I considered to be a once in the lifetime opportunity and so I was looking for a quick and easy way to capture the most of it. I somehow came across a YouTube videos showcasing a Xiaomi Mi Sphere camera (no longer available) and I immediately knew it was the thing I was looking for. I bought it and it quickly became one of my favorite photography related tools ever.

360° photos might not be the ones that get most attention and likes (yikes 😬) on social media but for me personally they are definitely the ones that tell the most authentic story of place where they were captured. Whenever I go out for a hike or just a short walk, I take my 360° camera with me and I take photos of all interesting locations. I don’t bother with adjusting the camera settings, I just push the button on a selfie stick, camera in AUTO mode beeps and that’s it - my memory of the location is captured and recorded on the memory card. When I come back home I copy all the photos to my computer, choose the best ones and publish them. However getting effectively through a lot of equirectangular images and selecting the best of them is not an easy thing to do. I struggled with this part of the process so hard that I decided to create my own lightweight and fast 360° image viewer. I named it KUK360 and I made it available as a closed-source application in Microsoft Store.

Update 01/2024: KUK360 is now open source and completely free.

Most of the times I publish my 360° photos on Facebook and Instagram but neither of these options is ideal. Instagram does not support 360° images at all and I have to convert every photo to a rotating video or use an alternative image projection. Facebook on the contrary supports 360° images quite well but it makes them hard to reach for unregistered users. So in addition to these two places, I decided to use open-source viewer called Pannellum and publish my photos also on my personal website, in this post, which I’ll be constantly updating over the time. I hope you’ll enjoy them 😉

Update 01/2024: I replaced the initial photos with a complete set from our trip to Iceland and I do not plan to add more photos to this post anymore. I will publish new parts of my journey instead.

Copyright © 2018-2024 Jaroslav IMRICH. All rights reserved.
None of the photos linked below may be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author.

Copyright © 2018-2024 Jaroslav IMRICH. All rights reserved.
None of the photos linked above may be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author.

All parts of the journey: 1 2

Move to older post or to index or to newer post.

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