The charm of ultra-wide angle lenses, the fascinating curvatures and perspective of fisheyes and immersive 360° shots

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It will have happened also to you to find yourself in certain beautiful places, which excite and kidnap with all their details, literally making us dizzy, where there is no shot that can do justice to everything, because beautiful things are everywhere: in front of us, behind us, to the right, to the left, above, below ! When so much suggestion surrounds us and literally immerses us, thinking of enclosing so much wealth of details in a single enveloping image would be a very fascinating idea; to think of making a "magical" shot that can reproduce and preserve that state of ecstasy that assails us, amazes us and captivates us, to think of being able to create a photograph that can crystallize everything around us into a magic ball, would be simply magnificent !

But all this is possible, for all this there is immersive photography, 360-degree photography, which captures everything around us, everything we can see, in a single enveloping spherical image in which the viewer has the impression of being in the center and being able to look around, without interruption, a particular photographic technique that produces spectacular and exciting images.

It is a photographic technique that has existed for a long time, but still little known and underestimated. It is a very descriptive type of photography, perfect for illustrating a place, but it also lends itself to incredible creative experimentation.

It involves creating a series of images around the center of gravity of the camera, then mounting the shots, with a special software, in a collage that returns an overall "spherical" image. Being a spherical image, obviously it will not be able to be printed on a flat and rectangular support, but to be displayed it needs a screen. To tell the truth it could also be printed, but you would get a completely distorted projection that doesn't make much sense, often unpleasant to the eye as it is perceived as unnatural by our brain.

The shots have to be very precise, and the camera has to rotate around its center of gravity (which is not the tripod mount) for the images to fit together perfectly. The most convenient and fastest thing is to use two fisheye lenses that each frame an angle of view greater than 180 °, in this way two images are enough to obtain a sphere.

Today there are cameras already equipped with two opposing fisheye lenses, with two sensors internally, which capture the entire horizon through a single shot, they are practically two cameras merged into a single body, and this makes immersive photography very practical, immediate, and therefore also very funny and fascinating, even if obviously the quality cannot be compared to what can be obtained with a reflex. Cell phones also offer the possibility of capturing 360 ° panoramas, but to tell the truth, holding the phone and turning around, all the part occupied by our body will be excluded from the image, as will the floor under us and the sky above, so this is not a real 360 ° photo.

An important detail is to delete the tripod and part of the camera itself from the final image, yes, because the 360 camera is incredible: it also photographs itself, nothing escapes it ! With this trick, the photograph will seem truly magical, the observer will have the impression of being suspended in the center of the image.

One of the greatest difficulties of this kind of photography is the management of the lights, in fact shooting everything we will always have considerable contrasts and different light situations to manage within the same image. For example, shooting outdoors, the sun will always be present in the frame, generating overexposure and reflections that are not indifferent. But with practice and inventiveness, you learn to remedy these drawbacks, for example by using the almost indispensable HDR technique.

To tell the truth, it would not even be correct to speak of framing, since everything is framed, rather we should speak of point of view, or shooting. The photographer, in order not to appear in the photo, must use the self-timer or a remote control, and run and hide ! It's funny, even if you appear crazy in the eyes of those who see us without knowing what we're doing !

The fun doesn't end with the shot, postproduction is often quite challenging, but once you get a good image, the same image becomes a whole world to explore and from which to get other exciting shots. Imagine the photograph as a rubber sphere, which can be not only rotated, but also deformed, inverted and cropped at will, in an almost endless kaleidoscopic game, the classic "tiny planet" or "rabbit hole" effects are beautiful.