I’ve played around with panos a little in the past but never really done a proper one. I’ve never used an L bracket…I just leveled the tripod by adjusting the legs, rotated and hung my camera off the side of the ballhead, levelled the camera and took a series of shots eyeballing a 25% overlap. Very unscientific. I always had to allow for generous cropping of the parallax? problem. Often I wouldn’t allow enough making a decent composition impossible.
So I decided to jump into the deeper water. I’m waiting for delivery of a Acratech Pano head w/levelling base…should arrive on Friday. I’m more interested in very high resolution files than making super long panos (although nice as an option) so I want to do some multi-row images. Maybe 3 rows high and 5 shots across or whatever. I will probably eventually be getting a Nodal Rail but we’ll see how it goes before I drop more $ into it.
Will the Nodal Rail come into play when I’m panning up or down? It seems like it would.
I’m finding it hard to visualize what would happen if it wasn’t precisely aligned in that direction. Will photoshop have a problem stitching an edge that isn’t straight?
Any opinions on the gear I ordered? Any advice or wisdom regarding panoramas would be appreciated.
You will definitely want to get an L bracket because you want to mount the camera vertical (portrait) orientation when doing a horizontal panorama. This optimizes the number of pixels vertically as you sweep the camera horizontally. By hanging the camera off the side of your ball head you are no longer putting the camera’s (lens) no parallax point off to the side of the tripods center of rotation. You want the no parallax point to be centered over the center of rotation.
You should aim for 30-50% overlap and take more space at the beginning and end of the panorama for cropping after stitching.
A nodal rail will also help to position the no parallax point over the center of rotation of the tripod. This will be more accurate than just using the L bracket my itself. However, if all of your subject is at infinity or close to infinity you don’t have to be very precise about the no parallax point. Using an L bracket alone will be ‘good enough’. This will probably be true for multirow panoramas but as you get parts of the subject closer to the lens the impact of parallax increases.
The newer panorama stitching algorithms are much better now and can handle issues much better. Other things to keep in mind are to use manual mode so exposure stays the same and also manual focus so focus isn’t changing. No circular polarizer, again to keep exposure the same as you rotate the camera.
Post processing in the popular programs like Lightroom, Photoshop, On1 and Luminar are ok but if you want to get ‘professional’ get PTGui but it is very expensive.
Have fun and ask more questions as you get started.
Jeff