Taking panoramas on the subway

So, I want to capture images on the subway. I’m thinking about taking 360 panoramas (Android’s Photo Spheres) on the station every 10 meters along the center of the plataform(s) of the stations I visit.

The platform locations are mapped on OSM, so I’d have to manually enter GPS information on the pictures (that naturally wouldn’t be georeferenced when shoot because the stations are underground).

Does anyone have experience in such mapping?

Cheers from Rio.

I was try to make photo spheres in Asus Nexus 7 in subway. There is too much poor aligin, even in new and bright station in frist day of work, so i not upload these to mapillary.

See 360 panorams at Category:Kotelniki (Moscow Metro) - Wikimedia Commons

Now i wait of begin sales Ricoh Theta S, it should have big ISO.

Trolleway just got my hands on a Ricoh Theta S. Here are the first images, they are from outside out Los Angeles office.

http://www.mapillary.com/map/im/MDrO9fehXK12vgKRe5-KJw/photo

Interesting. I don’t think I’d get my hands on a Theta soon, so I’d have to try to create the panos on Android.

How would you create the EXIF GPS tags on it? I don’t know if the process is somewhat different on pano images.

Cheers

so try Theta in subway :slight_smile:

Maybe you shouldn’t, it looks weird:

Of course it does, but in the other hand a) it’s way faster to capture the panoramas, and b) you don’t get stitch problems when things move everywhere in the image (people on the sidewalk, cars on the street etc).

I don’t think you want to hold it in your hand for longer sequences, but you want to mount it on a stick or monopod and then you could mount a disc between camera and stick so you don’t see the photographer. @peter promised me I could try the theta, so I’ll try some different setups then :slight_smile:

Yeah I took one photo. Put my hand down. Walked 10 meters then took another one.

Some lessons learnt in the process of taking Photo Spheres with Google Camera:

  1. Take as much time as possible between shooting photo spheres. The app does the processing, and it gets slow, and it gets hot. The app will crash, some of the panoramas with have black areas or be missing entirely. The rendering process fails silently.
  2. Have as much free space as possible, because even though a final sphere is only ~6MBs, it will need a lot of space to take the 54 photos (with ~4MB each) and join them.
  3. Bottomline: It is not worthy the work. Better take many common pictures, at least until I get a Theta.

@ZIMMY is doing an incredible job in the French subway : http://www.mapillary.com/map/im/ahgIhSNkhX_gm1Z9tCu7BA/photo You may ask him tips about his gear.

1 Like