Welcome to Planet View 360

Did you ever want to get a sense of a new restaurant or store before spending the time and effort to go there? 

While looking for a new job in a new town, I often visited Google Maps for directions and information about businesses in the area. I'd read reviews, look at photos and try to get a sense of a place before visiting or just to see if I wanted to visit the establishment. Google has hundreds of photos for many places but most of them didn't show the interiors, just the food on a plate or a display case. Not good for getting a lay of the place and/or seeing how much seating is available. I noticed a few 360° photos and started to wonder why more places didn't have them. These are much like the street view feature on Google maps and I found them very helpful. This led me to think, what if I could do those for businesses and find some way to monetize these photos.

Being me, I have to find a way to be an expert at taking the photos before I even try to get paid for taking them. So first, buy a camera. I watched many videos on 360° cameras but wasn't sure I wanted to spend the ~$500 to get started. Of course, money is an issue when you're not working. I bit the bullet and bought a consumer-grade model from Insta360 as it kept showing up as one of the best in that category. With accessories about $450 to start, it's still a bit of money. See I get nervous with anything over $300. After about a month of going back and forth, I finally decided that I needed to move forward or this wasn't going to happen. Boom, purchased on Amazon. Two days later, it arrives and I'm actually reading the instructions and watching videos on how to use it. Yeah, I know, who does that?! Why not just start taking pictures? Again, I need to be an expert before I start something. I'm not going to be but I feel more confident that I'm not going to waste a lot of time just trying to figure out how to use the camera.

This is my first attempt at a business of my own and I realize it will take time to get anywhere but wasting time is no ones wish.

So let's start this off with a couple of my first shots. The first one is on google maps for the Willamette Park in Corvallis. As you can see, I need to figure out how to not be in the photos and how to post them as a 360 view.