I finally made a Photo-sphere tripod mount

January 25, 2020

I have been wanting to post photo-sphere photos of the camper for a while, and while my cell phone camera allows me to do it hand held - they never come out that good because it is really hard to hold the camera in exactly the right place through all of the photos needed.  It becomes even worse when you are trying to do them indoors where things are close to the camera - as the stitch lines become even worse and things look really bad. So - today was the day I tackled making a cell phone holder which would allow me to rotate the cell phone around the focus point of the camera (or at least somewhat close to it).  To do this required making it so the whole camera can swivel around in both the horizontal axis and the vertical axis so the camera can point at every spot in the room while keeping the camera itself in the same location.

The bottom most piece of wood (little square block) has a 1/4-20 nut rammed into it so the tripod can screw into it. The horizontal piece above that is screwed into the lower block - with the screw directly under where the cell phone camera is (so if you swivel things so the phone is horizontal then the screw should be in the center of the image) . . . That horizontal piece has two verticals screwed to it (like goal posts) and this whole thing rotates around spinning like a top. The cell phone is mounted by re-using an old cell phone mount for a bike that I am no longer using.  That is just screwed to 1/4" plywood which has some other wood mounted to it to hold everything in place and make it easy to locate the cell phone in the right spot . . . That whole cell phone mount is pivoted around the screws at the top of the goal posts so the whole cell phone mount thing can swing to look up and down (once again it has to swivel around the location of the camera lens on the phone).

Once mounted on the tripod you get something that looks like this

The whole thing has enough friction to mostly stay in one spot when I let it go - this makes it easy to set the height and swivel it around the bottom axis for all the photos at one level - then I tilt up to the next level and do it again. To get an entire set of photos takes 5 different up and down tilts and lots of times around - so each photo takes me several minutes to get. And here is my first camper result - yes the camper is a mess, and the weather is yucky . . . Didn't really get anything super ready - but it shows that this thing seems to work!

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