Nodal point slides

MrDrizz

MrDrizz

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I do like making panos and have always just turned the camera around on the ball head. Results are decent enough out of PS.
But have been thinking about getting a nodal slide/bracket to cut out any parallax issues.
Just wondering if it's worth the investment or is the stitching software so good these days that it can deal with parallax pretty well?

I've seen this and it look suitable for my Fuji X-t10, not expensive either and will work with the Arca-Swiss style bracket I have on the camera.
 
What sort of Panoramas do you do... Ihave a Nodal ninja Mk3 2 and it is excellent But I very rarely use it these days. as 99% I now take hand held.
It is best to always take pans with the camera in the portrait orientation as it avoids the long thin look.
If you intend to take 360x180 pans with a fish eye lens like the samyang. a Ring type bracket is more useful ( also available from NN)

However going back to simple single row and double row pans. the software you use is far more critical Both PTAssembler and PTGui give far better results than Photosshop with a far wider choice of projections.

I use PTAssembler using the panomatic picker and smartblend blender. Smartblend in particular avoids most parallax issues.
Unlike Photoshop it is easy to mask areas to avoid duplication of moving features, or to specify which portion from a pair of images should be visible.
(PTGui is even easier but is more expensive, It is also the software of choice for 360x180.)

See http://www.tawbaware.com/ptasmblr.htm
http://wiki.panotools.org/SmartBlend
http://shop.nodalninja.com/collections/r1-r10-r20-heads-pkgs

A recent hand held 3 shot pan that could be problematic using a Nodal slide but had to avoid duplication of moving subjects and parallax It seems top have suffered in the size reduction. but shows how modern software can cope with parallax and distortion. Taken on a Fuji x30.

 
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Thanks Terry, I'm not sure if I'd ever go the full 360x180, My Samyang 12mm is pretty wide so it'd probably be more just a sweep to get a little more of the scene in.
As for software I've used Hugin a far bit although that it a complicated bit of software to get to grips with.
 
MrDrizz said:
I've seen this and it look suitable for my Fuji X-t10
Click to expand...
The way they show using it is wrong. All you really need is the nodal slide for single row panos. Plus, they are nice to have in order to balance a camera/lens (w/o foot) on a head...

The panning clamp allows you to level the camera using the head instead of the legs (which is nice), but it goes *under* the nodal slide.
 
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MrDrizz said:
Thanks Terry, I'm not sure if I'd ever go the full 360x180, My Samyang 12mm is pretty wide so it'd probably be more just a sweep to get a little more of the scene in.
As for software I've used Hugin a far bit although that it a complicated bit of software to get to grips with.
Click to expand...

Hugin is fairly simple but not as good as the offerings i mentioned.
If you want to get to grips with pans, you must bite the bullet, and spend time on the necessary learning curve.
It is only difficult until you know what you are doing. Most hand held pans only take a couple of minutes to do.

you will be surprised how little difference pan heads make. Far more stitches go wrong because the program choses poor control points.
In phothoshop you have no means of correcting this. So perfectly shot stitches with the entrance pupil perfectly placed (nodal point)
Still can come out badly.
my usual process is to start the stitch on automatic and check the preview. If the stitch is less than perfect. I examine the control points and delete the badly placed ones..very close, on leaves, branches sky or water or moving subjects are obviously going to cause problems. As are ones grouped closely together.
I then reoptomise and do another preview.
 
Brilliant. Cheers.
I have a panoramic in mind and if it stops raining for an hour I'll go shoot it and give PT assembler with smart blend a try.
 
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