Hi,

I'm looking to acquire a chrome ball for lighting, is anyone aware of a place where I can get one in Toronto (or online)? I found a candidate a C2B, but it's quite irregular and distorted… I'm looking for something of a more decent quality.

Thanks a lot!

Cheers

amazon has some…
can't say anything about the quality…

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006GKDVPE/ref=asc_df_B006GKDVPE2203333?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&tag=nextagus0019649-20&linkCode=asn&creative=395093&creativeASIN=B006GKDVPE [amazon.com]

what you should look for are called Gazing Balls/Spheres…garden centers carry them

I've actually ran a bunch of garden centers and none has the silver chrome gazing balls. At most they had the tinted glass patterned types.
Thanks though, will try my luck at amazon.

Cheers

Try checking some machine shops or ball bearing supply shops around Toronto. I remember C.O.R.E. way back went through a few gazing balls (tended to break at the most inopportune time) and then had a couple solid steel 3“ balls made. At the time it was pretty cheap. One was polished and one was matte.

I have used a 1.5” chromed spherical door pull with a good macro lens (of course put the screw end away from camera and great for mounting on stick). Lee Valley???

An alternative is to go the lens camera route. Get a hemispherical fish-eye lens but can get pricey ($500+) or get a conversion lens to mount on a wide angle lens (still pricey at $300). You can even get a hemispherical lens for your iPhone (iPro Lens ~$230cdn from Vistek).

Rent a Hemispherical lens for a day from Vistek/Henry's and go wild. Grab a PC lens as well to grab t-maps.

Depends if you will be making a few HDRI images.

Put on a tripod head, you can take 4 quick snaps to get a real HDRI polar image with incredible fidelity. Way faster than the chrome ball technique.

This assumes you actually have a good camera and good lens (+$3k as anything less will invariably have it's own distortion issues).

I use a manfrotto sph360 tripod head that allows the camera to get in nodal and gives clean full 360's with no camera reflections and full detail which works amazing.

You can buy up to 3 1/2 " stainless ball bearing for about 150.00 at a place like Grainger or McManus Carr that will be far superior in quality to a garden store globe but the major drawback is that the camera will always be in the center and the detail in the edges is usually low fidelity.

Thanks a lot, Jeff and Jordan. ball bearing shops sounds interesting. I've looked into the lens way, I have a nikon DSLR that's good enough, but since this is more of a learning exercise I was cautious about spending the cash. I'm double thinking that now, even because renting one of those lenses is almost as expensive as buying them!
Very useful advice, thanks again.

Cheers

Believe it or not this actually produces great results as well…

http://www.pixeet.com [pixeet.com]

Cheaper than a ball bearing…

if you have deep pockets, the quality of a spherocam is unparalleled. amazing for IBL

http://www.photographyblog.com/news/spherocam_hdr_camera_system/ [photographyblog.com]

(Imho) the only situation that still requires chrome balls is when you have to get the probe from a place on set that is (for whatever reason) too small for the camera/nodal-setup.

For everything else the balls are outdated.

Thanks for all the info guys!
Jordan, I like the pixeet idea, although my iphone was smashed to bits recently…

Cheers

Oh I would love to have the spherocam.

But for those hard to capture panoramic images why not get a throwable camera. I saw this at Siggraph a year ago:
http://jonaspfeil.de/ballcamera [jonaspfeil.de]
There's even an HDRI version of this you can get.
Just toss it and when it hits the apex, “snap” there's your envmap.

YEAH!!! I saw this too, just awesome!
Doesn't look like it's for sale yet though…

Or how about go and buy a 8mm fish eye lens.

Rob

8mm fisheye lens: $800
good pano head $300

Definitely not prohibitive, but still too much for me at this point as I'm just doing it for the learning.

Cheers

Thank you arctor for the link Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2012 10:25 pm

The link to the Chrome Sphere saved me. Just in the nick of time.

Mahalo,
Kai B.