Environment maps shot via light probe have some problems you don’t see with full-on panoramas. The distortion around the probe’s rim will pull away from some detail, culminating in the blind spot behind the probe. This means you have to make hard decisions about what gets distorted. If several things are important, how do you put them in a heirarchy?
I usually try to make the angle from me to the probe to the sun 90 degrees. The pier at Anthony’s is one example where I make an exception. Since half this landscape is a view of the water, you’d end up using this in 3D scenes that also are at a water’s edge. So wouldn’t it stink to jam all those watery pixels into the rim distortion? But shooting parallel to the repeating boards of the pier also appealed as a detail to avoid distorting. I shot a little of everything.
Not that I’m trashing probes. Don’t forget, if you’re shooting a full-on panorama, you’re way more likely to have some jogger and his dog ruin your scene, or have the clouds and light shift over the time it takes to shoot. And who wants to slave over 2 gigs of CR2 files, just to make a single EXR that crashes Blender anyway?
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