July 28, 2011 
For the past week or so I have had a voyage into the world of panoramas. I have always collected free spherical panoramas for rendering in 3d and now I thought it was time to try and create some myself.
I have a capable camera (Olympus E-3) with a wide angle normal lens (12-60mm swd) and a tripod to go with. First time i tried panoramas a while back was with a fisheye lens and camera mounted straight on to the tripod. This off course causes parallax problems between the shots. Which explains why I had so much trouble stitching them.
This time around I read up on the subject of shooting panoramas and looked for a proper panorama head for the tripod. The price on professional once ar hefty to say the least. So the obvious thing was to build one myself!
I began to search for DIY (Do It Yourself) projects regarding panorama heads and found loads of them. In different shapes, sizes and material.
I decided to go the woody way and started sketching on a blueprint with measurements taken for my camera.
After a rigorous search for the correct screws, material and tools I started to put the thing together. After 2 evenings of trying it was done!
Here is the result.
After some adjusting for the correct (or close to correct) no-parallax point I could give the rig a try.
This image was shot at 12mm (2x crop factor due to 4/3 sensor), 8 pictures around in two rows. I did shoot a top and down picture but they weren’t used for this particular panorama.
All 16 pictures were taken with 5 exposures each. So all in all 80 pictures.
I stitched this with PTGui flawlessly without having to adjust any control points manually. Very awesome software!
Here is a smaller version of the 15000×6000 pixel panorama.
It worked like a charm as a HDR in 3d rendering. And I used it to create my first planet 
All in all a very fun project and I will try to take more panoramas at better places. Stay tuned for more!
Over and out!
Cool !