Making Wee Planets

Here's a strange but fascinating trick that you can do with your camera and photoshop.  It's called "Wee Planets" and it can be a little time consuming but a lot of fun.  You start out by mounting your camera on a tripod and then start shooting pictures while panning across the landscape.  We're going to be making a panorama picture so the idea is to pan across gradually so that about one third of the previous shot is in your next shot.  That way photoshop will know what goes to what when you stitch them together.  However the big difference this time is that we're going to do a 360 degree panorama.  After taking your pictures and loading them into photoshop's panorama builder.  After you have your panorama picture compiled, then you'll want to shape it into a square in the image size dialog.  Release the proportion restraints and make the image just as wide as it is tall.  After than, rotate the image 180 degrees so it's upside down.  Then from the filter drop down menu you want to select Filter/Distort/Polar Coordinates.  There you have the wee planet.  This is just the beginning to the things you can do with this technique and I plan to play with it more in the future.