My 360° photo journey - Part 1
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.
Please note that photos are published here in their full resolution of 6912*3456 pixels but with JPEG quality reduced to 50% in order to decrease their size and save the bandwidth.
360° Photo - Dyrhólaey peninsula - Iceland
360° Photo - Reynisfjara black-sand beach - Iceland
360° Photo - Skógafoss waterfall - Iceland
360° Photo - Seljalandsfoss waterfall - Iceland
360° Photo - The highland center Hrauneyjar - Iceland
360° Photo - Hnausapollur (Bláhylur) lake - Iceland
360° Photo - Laugahraun lava field in the Landmannalaugar area - Iceland
360° Photo - Gullfoss waterfall - Iceland
360° Photo - Öxarárfoss waterfall - Iceland
360° Photo - Hallgrímskirkja church - Iceland
All parts of the journey: 1 2
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.