P365 Apr 15 - Failed experiment

Doh. I was planning to get out and take some photos somewhere pretty today, but my neck/shoulder was playing up, so I stayed home (I have a massage booked this week). I wanted to do SOMETHING productive with my camera, so I thought I'd try out an idea I've played with briefly before. By photographing a mirrored sphere, one can invert and un-warp the reflected image, and by taking photos of the sphere from a couple of angles, merge those images together to create a full panorama from the vriewpoint of the sphere. When it works, the effect is quite striking, as it looks like one is a Lilliputian in a giant's world. It's also possible to get unique angles of confined spaces. I have done this to some degree of success before on my desk.

This time I decided to see what the view was like from under the hood of the car. Unfortunately, it didn't work too well. The surface of the pinball I used is hardly of optical quality, so the glare from the direct sunlight lit up every imperfection on the ball. Also, due to the small size of the ball, imperfections are by comparison very large, and due to the minimum focusing distance of the camera, the ball appeared small in the photo. This resulted in a low resolution, blurry panorama marred by the flawed ball's surface. Incidentally, the black patch is where I've edited myself out of the shot.

I still think this concept has great potential, but I think before I can attempt it seriously, there's a couple of things I need to get hold of first: some extension tubes, so that I can get the camera closer and fill the view with the sphere, and a larger, optical quality mirror sphere. I already have some tubes on their way to me, hopefully arriving this week, however, I have no idea where I'll find a sphere. On the off chance that anyone knows where I could find a 30-70mm optical quality mirror sphere, please email me or leave a comment on this post.

Sorry for the lengthy and technical post, but I'm hoping anyone into experimental photography may have found it interesting :)