360s Panoramas

If you've been out and about in the county recently you may have spotted a couple of suspicious looking characters skulking around the county.

A lovely location but where would you hide?

They'd have been carrying a funny looking camera which they set up by pointing it at the sky. Then one crawls underneath it and the other hides behind the nearest tree! Weird!

Don't panic too much though, they've just escaped from the BBC for a day, to take some panoramic photos for the Devon website.

The amazing 360 degree images on the site are captured by a camera, with a lens that looks like a spotlight, mounted on a tripod. The most tricky bit of the operation is to make sure you're well hidden so you don't appear in every picture.

The camera has an "all-seeing eye", which means as soon as you've pushed the timer button, you've got about eight seconds to get out of sight.

A 360 image in its raw state - a donut!

That sounds simple but where do you hide if you're taking a shot in the middle of a river? You can't exactly crouch beneath the tripod can you?

The images, that are downloaded on to a computer, appear in a 'donut' shape and a clever little bit of software is used to straighten them out (unfurl them) and create the 360 degree photo.

When it's placed in the page, behind what is effectively a window, the picture can be scrolled around and tilted up and down.

Silly Moo! John Govier is hiding from the cows!

The results - as you can see - are fantastic. The looks on the faces of the people who don't know what we're doing though can often be a picture themselves!

We hope you enjoy our efforts. Maybe we should start a competition asking you to guess where we were hiding in each photo!

We've given the game away with one of our pictures, John Govier crouching beside the gate to get a shot of a field full of cows - but where do you think he ended up when he was taking the picture in the middle of the stream at Harford? You can see the finished photo by clicking on the link at the top of this page.