Ryan Burnside recently set out to find a cheap way to shoot 360-degree panoramas of scenes, and discovered that shooting a Christmas ornament (or any other spherical reflection) captures all the information needed — all that’s needed is a way to “unravel” the spherical image. Burnside found that the free image editor GIMP can do the trick.
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Just because you use the built-in flash on your compact camera doesn’t mean you need to live with harsh, direct lighting. Here’s a quick video tutorial teaching how to use any small white card (e.g. a piece of scrap paper or a business card) to easily bounce your flash and soften the lightning.

(via Pixiq)