Tutorial 6
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to adjust / calibrate your panoramic tripod head to find the no-parallax point (also incorrectly referred to as “nodal point”) for your lens. This is very important to minimise the stitching errors in your panoramas.
The process can take a little while, but you’ll hopefully take away some tips on how to speed it up and reduce the amount of “trial and error” involved.
Now, all this no-parallax-point-business can be quite confusing and I’m not terribly good at explaining it. If you’re the technical type, I would really recommend you read this very detailed article by Michel Thoby.
thank you, very useful tutorial !!!
What a great tutorial. I have one question though. Say in order to create a 360×180 panorama I need to shoot a bunch of images at -30° pitch and another bunch at +30° pitch. Do I have to recalibrate my tripod head for each angle, or is it sufficient if I just find the no-parallax at 0°and then tilt my camera around? Thank you.
Provided your tripod mount is in line with the optical axis of your camera, you only need to adjust the two things I show in the video (the easy first step using live-view, and the second one using the trial-and-error back and forth…).
This is a great tutorial, but is there a certain distance we should place the stick, or we can just align a near object with a distant object and that would work fine?
Thank you
No, but the closer the better 😉 But not too close either, or you won’t get it sharp enough relative to the distant object…
hi florian, thanks for the great tutorials!! I have a question — once you find the no parallax point and write where everything is situated on the tripod head, i can repeat this formula for different set ups and locations, correct? meaning… if i use the same lens, camera, and tripod, i don’t need to find the no parallax point each time i set up a new shot?
Correct, the settings are specific to the lens/camera/triopdhead combination, but not the shooting location 😉
Could you please explain how I can display compass data on my panoramas, please? Sometime I would really benefit from displaying where is North, East, South, West and have some lines between them. Or even have a 360-degree “chart” where I would mark truth North as 0 degree.
Kind Regards
Sammy
Hi Samma, that’s all got to do which viewer you use to display your panoramas online. KRPano for instance has several plugins for that, and this can also be done for sure in Pano2VR, but it might require some amount of development / help from the respective support communities.
Hi Florian, really great tutorial, i’m looking to build my equipment for this experiment I’ll be getting a canon 8- 15mm and the Nodal Ninja 3 but what tripod do you suggest? and which do you use in this video? thank you
It doesn’t really matter, to be honest. Take one, where you can raise the centre column separately so you can “rise” as much as possible above the three legs, which you want to tuck in somewhat in order to minimise the nadir footprint.