Finally good panoramas happening!

I used a Nikon D40 (DSLR) with a 18-55 lens to shoot all the below images. I used a Simpex tripod to mount the camera on. The tripod was not too good and had a few loose joints, but the nice software even compensated for most of the parallax errors.
Now with the specialised software, things became easy. With all the photographs taken almost properly, I achieved the below image after the stitch in Hugin. It's still not perfect as one can see. There are a few blurred areas where the control points (points generated and used as references to sync two consecutive images) did not sync properly. And after turning it into the 3D environment, there were a few loopholes. a) The top pole of the image, on the sky, there had been a mismatch in images. In fact the photographs of the sky was yet not complete and so the software stretched the images a bit to make-up for the missing images. b)The top of the attic is a bit curved and distorted. That was bound to happen as there a particular slice of image was missing, and I made it in Photoshop! But overall I was confident that now I can do this.


(Move the mouse pointer inside the image window to move through the image, press shift to zoom, press ctrl to zoom out)






For a full window view go to
http://diplopanarama.99k.org/our%20terrace/DSC_4840%20Panorama4a.html

To eliminate the possibility of getting missing slices in the final panorama, for the next attempt I decided to take a few extra photographs rather than shooting 'just enough' of them. So I decided I will start by taking a single shot of the top pole on the sky, and then I'll tilt down the camera only a little (about 30degree, as the FOV of my camera in full wide angle is around 66degree, and about 50% image overlapping is recommended for a good stitch), and then take a 360 degree rotation to take an overlapping set of a total panorama. Then I'll again tilt down the camera a little, and repeat the process, so on and so forth till I reach the ground. This way I'll be moving in a spiral manner from top to bottom, and will end up practically scanning the whole image dome around me through my camera. Towards the end the tripod would come into the frame, but that too can be masked out in the software.
By this time I was confident enough to go and shoot in the outdoors. So I did in the nearby University ground. And then when I fitted the pieces together in Hugin, voila! It was a perfect 360X180 panorama! The result is given below for all of my readers to see.




For a full window view go to
http://diplopanarama.99k.org/JU%20green%20zone/JU%20green%20zone%20Panorama%20hdr_grain%20reduce_low%20res.html

Next stop: the actual space!