Some people can just lounge around on a Sunday and do nothing, I’m not really one of them.  I always need to have a little project or day trip to keep me amused.  This weekend I was sitting in my backyard, watching the birds and sipping a drink and thought, why not make one of those so-called mini-planets one sees on the internet.

So, I ran inside, grabbed my trusty Olympus OMD EM-5 and a tripod.  This was the first time doing a mini-planet and my first attempt was a failure.  Turns out I really needed an ultrawide lens to frame both the sky and the ground.  I changed my lens to the Panasonic 7-14mm ultrawide.  Next, I shot a 360 panorama of the backyard and got my first mini-planet.

The basic technique is to put one’s camera on a tripod and shoot several images, each time panning the camera around 30 degrees to create a 360 degree panorama.  Those images are stitched together in Photoshop, cleaned up a bit and the a polar distortion filter is applied.  There are tons of internet articles on this technique, so I won’t go into details here.

Later in the day, I tried to make another mini-planet of my street.  It didn’t turn out as well as I would have liked.  No matter, this was about having fun and learning something new.