360 Panoramic Photography. Getting Started.
Whilst creating Virtual Tours and panoramic images is not something that one can learn in an instant, a budding enthusiast can (with practise) produce worthy results to a limited extent after a number of attempts.
Browsing shelves in bookshops and libraries, photographers can find huge amounts of information on all fields of digital photography including panoramic photography, but the creation of a virtual tour does not just involve taking pictures. So where to start? An important consideration is budget, therefore you should decide early on what your ultimate goals are; do you simply want to impress the relatives with a 360 shot of your garden or are you aiming for results that can be used practically? Perhaps you are selling your home and want to produce a virtual tour to help market your house on the internet. (At the time of writing, Summer 2009, Estate Agents in the UK are still pathetically shy of using such technology, however their counterparts in the US [realtors] are utilising such tools to the full.)
Once you have worked out a sensible budget you can start looking at equipment. It is important to prepare a list of everything that you will need and then allocate an amount to each item. If you are already a photographer then presumably you will not need to splash out on a camera; however a typical point and shoot will not be much use in producing great looking panoramic shots. Your best bet will be a DSLR so that you can choose manual settings for the required shots.
360 Panoramic Photography ~ Equipment & Software
Here is a checklist of what you will need:
Camera, lens, tripod, Panoramic head, stitching software, Virtual Reality software(Flash or Quicktime)
The above represents the bare minimum. If you really want good results you will definitely need Photoshop as well.
So let us start with the camera. A good entry level DSLR is the Nikon D40 or D60. 
You could pick a second hand one up on ebay for a couple of hundred pounds. Thats great. Now all you need is a suitable lens. The Nikkor 10.5mm fisheye is a good bet and again if you do not want to pay full price (£300 approx) try ebay.
Now this bit is important so pay attention. Do not bother splashing out loads of cash on a camera and lens if you are going to buy your tripod from Argos. Because if you buy your tripod from Argos, for one it will not be sterdy and for two, you may not be able to fit a panoramic head to it. You might as well take your pictures hand-held! You can buy a good sturdy tripod for in the region of £100 (eg manfrotto). The panoramic head will cost more and I would not really recommend buying a second hand one. If it has any damage of any kind then it will be useless. Some people make their own and claim they do a good job but I find this hard to believe. These are precision instruments and the set-up has to be perfect or else you are looking at parallax and stitching errors big time. If you want to save money this is not the place to do it. Go online and search for Nodal Ninja. Manfrotto and 360 precision also manufacture pano heads but these are more expensive.
There are a few options worth looking at for stitching software. I first started off using one called Panorama Factory which worked well for cylindrical panos (360 degrees horizontal but limited field of view vertically). However if you want 360 x 180 field of view (spherical image) I would suggest either PTgui or Autopano pro. Both have free trial versions that you can experiment with. Autopano pro is the more user friendly of the two but most professionals end up using PTgui. 
If you simply want to print your images or show them off flat on a computer screen then you will probably go for the cylindrical option, however if you go for the spherical option then you will also need VR software to view the image. The two best formats are Adobe Flash and Quick Time. PTgui has an option to output the stitched panorama straight to Quick Time which makes life easy but if you want to output in Flash then there are some good VR software options. These include Krpano, Flash Panorama Player (FPP) and Pano2VR. Of these Pano2VR is by far the most user friendly for first time users. All three have free trial versions I believe so give a couple of them a go and make your decision.
As mentioned above, Photoshop is also an invaluable tool to have as part of your arsenal but it does not come cheap. Search around on the Internet as there are deals to be had, but beware: if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is! I have fallen foul of a software website myself that was offering unbelievable deals on various Adobe packages. When the disc arrived it was a copy and had no keycode with it. The website went off the air shortly afterwards and I did not get my money back.
