Fred Ruff with a great post on creating mirror ball and panoramic HDR images starting from shooting the images, creating the HDR in photoshop, and unwrapping them to something useful in a 3d application.
“I’ve been shooting mirrored balls for many years now. Mirrored balls work pretty damn good for capturing much of a scene’s lighting. Many times on a set, all the lights are comming from behind the camera, and the mirrored ball will capture these lights nicely. Where a mirrored ball starts to break down is when lighting is comming from behind the subject. It will capture some lights behind the ball, but since that light is only showing up in the very deformed edges of the mirrored ball, it’s not gonna be that acurate for doing good rim lighting.”
