Gear:
Samyang 14mm/2.8 + K5 + tripod. Any wide lens will do, just ensure about 30-50% overlap between shots. So you can use a 24mm lens, you just have 4-5x as many shots to take. I have even used a 50mm lens - that can produce giga-pixel sized images
There are a lot of googlable tutorials on using Hugin to create stereographic projections. They will likely be better than anything I could type in...
Process / Time:
But everything I've done is using Hugin. For these HDR images, you might have 250 to 1000 stills being stitched. So I have a dedicated ( discarded ) server with 8 cores + 12GB RAM and a lot of disks. I can be stitching 2 large projects and editing another at the same time on that class box. I typically render out a 30000x15000 pixel master image, then use GIMP to clean them up. But you can use smaller output images and crappier computers successfully.
The setup of the tripod, and shooting takes less than 10 minutes doing it manually. I use a wired remote to get my feet and legs and shadows out of the shot. When using a narrower lens, I use a mufti-purpose A-Z telescope mount to automate the shooting process. But the Samyang is doing a fine job and requires perhaps 50 shots to cover the whole world-sphere with 50% overlap.
Creating the Hugin project is perhaps another 10-15 minutes of intermittent clicking, and mostly its a lot of waiting for the alignments and optimizations to complete. Then another 10 minutes of fiddling with mask creation, and getting the PoV right to reposition the planet into a more aesthetically pleasing way.
After it renders, another 10-50 minutes of hasty cleanup in GIMP to get it into the state you see.
-- Bob
http://bob-o-rama.smugmug.com -- Photos
http://www.vimeo.com/boborama/videos -- Videos
http://blog.trafficshaper.com -- Blog
