Here’s a post which is designed to save me a couple of emails per month, so please bear with me.

I often get asked (usu­ally by people who saw my pan­or­amic pho­to­graphy tutorial videos) if they can use a “reg­u­lar” 8mm or 10mm wide angle lens instead of an 8mm or 10mm fisheye lens (on a cam­era with a 1.5x crop sensor is used) to pro­duce full 360×180° pan­or­a­mas.

The answer is: Of course you can, but you will need to take more images to cover the entire sphere. With both fisheye lenses, you can get away with as little as 4 images to cover everything — with the non-​fisheyes you need a bare min­imum of 12, but more like 16 shots to have cap­tured everything.

Without want­ing to get tech­nical, this has to do with the field of view that both lens types offer (due to the dif­fer­ent pro­jec­tions): The fisheye typ­ic­ally shows you much more than the wide angle since, grossly sim­pli­fied, the fisheye “squeezes” things the more you move away from the cen­ter, whereas the wide angle lens tends to “stretch” things. In terms of num­bers, both fisheyes give you a 180° field of view around the diag­onal. The wide angle lenses in turn only give you 110 – 120°…

Click on the image above to see a quick visual com­par­ison between the dif­fer­ent lenses /​images they pro­duce. Pay par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to what is included and what is not included in the extreme corners.

Lenses used: Peleng 8mm ƒ/3.5 fisheye and Sigma 10mm ƒ/2.8 fisheye on a 1.5x crop sensor, and a Sigma 12-​24mm on full frame sensor (to sim­u­late 8mm/​10mm on crop).

I’d like to quickly report a great cus­tomer ser­vice exper­i­ence.

About 4 years ago, I got myself a PANTONE huey to colour-​calibrate my mon­it­ors. This is par­tic­u­larly import­ant for pho­to­graph­ers as it ensures that your mon­itor accur­ately repro­duces col­ours. It comes in two ver­sion, the reg­u­lar one, and the PRO ver­sion.

Now sadly there was a bit of an issue with mine, and some­times the cal­ib­ra­tion would res­ult in a slightly pink­ish mon­itor image. Only some­times how­ever, and it was rel­at­ively easy to detect. Any­way, I read on some forum that you can write to PANTONE about it, and so I did, about a week ago.

Today UPS dropped off a brand new huey from them… No ques­tions asked, and they even upgraded me to the PRO ver­sion (which costs a good bit more than the reg­u­lar ver­sion I ori­gin­ally pur­chased) for free — not sure if this was a mis­take or inten­tional.

In any case, that’s what I call decent cus­tomer ser­vice, and because they made me so happy, I’m writ­ing about it here.