Panorama tripod head's

[Steve Pedersen]

i would like to know what brand/model panorama head you guys are using and your experiences with them, also do you know of any good diy panorama head build projects ?
For you guys that don't use one how do you deal with the parallax distortion ?

I would also appreciate some suggestions for good panorama photo stitching software.

thank you.

[inkista]

I've used Nodal Ninjas (1 and 2) for all my panoshooting. Works great for me, but I shoot spherical/VR/equirectangular panos with a fisheye, [which, btw, colors all of my advice below. If you're looking to do gigapixel high-res type panos, all of the advice below may not be the best fit]. Since I bought my NN, however, Nick Fan's been making the NNs more and more expensive. They used to be in the $200 range, but now they're more in the $300-$500 range. I love my NN, though. Breaks down small, very sturdy, very precise. Never let me down.

One low-cost alternative is the Panosaurus. There are, literally dozens of pano heads/systems to look into. The Panotools.org wiki and the panoguide.com forum are two great places to look for information on this stuff.

I do also shoot panos handheld (because I use an 8mm circular fisheye, which gives enough coverage), and I can tell you that parallax isn't quite the bugaboo most of the websites out there make it out to be, if you don't have to deal with a lot of nearby objects. If you're shooting a claustropano, in tight spaces, with a lot of stuff right at your feet, however, then, yes, it becomes highly critical. But, as I said, I've gotten away with shooting handheld both with and without a y-string, and still gotten a stitchable result, mostly with the help of Photoshop's patch tool and some judicious tweaking of control points. You can get away with a bit of parallax error if you're shooting faraway things, and there are no distinct features at the zenith/nadir points.

In terms of panostitching software, I use PTGui. The masking features alone are worth the price (I rarely need to hit photoshop with a stitch these days), but if that's too rich for your blood, you can always go with the open source Hugin.

For cube face editing, I use CubicConverter, but that's because I'm an oldtimer who started on a Mac. Chances are good the best package for this, now, is Pano2VR.

For showing off my equirectangular/VRs, I use the iPhone app, SphereView.

For messing about with weird remappings, I mostly use the Photoshop plugin, Flexify, and the "Quincuncial" Mathmap script by breic in the Gimp.

Yeah. Been doing this a little too long.

[dlambert]

Great answer, inkista. Have you ever tried the HDR pano features in PTGui? I was wondering how to do something like that myself -- having it all rolled into one might be a good option.

[Doug Sundseth]

I pretty much only do landscape panos, and I don't normally have a huge amount of foreground stuff to deal with. Given that, I shoot handheld nearly always and stitch in Photoshop.

An example (IIRC this was a 6-shot hand-held pano):

[inkista]

Originally Posted by dlambert

Great answer, inkista. Have you ever tried the HDR pano features in PTGui? I was wondering how to do something like that myself -- having it all rolled into one might be a good option.

I haven't done it in PTGui* (I'm a relatively recent refugee from PTMac), but I have enfused panos in Hugin, and assume it's pretty similar: just load up all the images and hit the button.


three sets of 8 images, bracketed by ±2EV. Handheld.

Here's the middle exposure set all by itself:


It's nice to let the machine do all the work. I'm also lazy enough that I tend to use enfuse instead of HDR, because I don't have to bother with tonemapping, and I prefer the more naturalistic default look.

Originally Posted by Doug Sundseth

I pretty much only do landscape panos, and I don't normally have a huge amount of foreground stuff to deal with. Given that, I shoot handheld nearly always and stitch in Photoshop...

Similar experience. With landscape panos, I'm always shooting handheld and have easily been able to cover a grid of 9x3 shots for coverage. I think the only time you'd need a pano head for this kind of shooting is if you plan on using longer telephoto lens with a very narrow FoV, and need to track scene coverage more precisely, or if you're going to be doing sphericals with nearby objects, like, say, being on a narrow stairway:



interactive view.

----
*Addendum. No wait. I lie. I forgot. I have done an exposure-fused pano in PTGui. Dead easy. Just loaded up the images and pushed the button.

[Steve Pedersen]

Thank you vary much for sharing your experiences and pointing me in a few new directions to look around in I really appreciate it.

[Krusty79]

Flickr: Discussing DIY Pano Head in Hugin Users Group

http://www.worth1000.com/tutorials/161123/tutorial

[sk66]

A special Pano head really isn't necessary. I hate extra gear which requires swapping stuff out etc, especially if it costs much.

Any tripod/head will do, the only caveat is that the head needs to be arca compatible.

Just level the tripod. If the tripod/head doesn't have a level built in you can get a $2 hotshoe level for the camera. Use a long arca rail (<$50) to mount the camera at the nodal point. If you are using a lens with the rail attached to the tripod collar you can shoot in landscape and portrait view. If the rail is mounted to the camera you are probably stuck with landscape orientation.

Easy and cheap.

[inkista]

And that's where a spherical pano shooter differs wildly. Jerry-rigged setups can work, but in the end specialized equipment saves you so much time and energy, you kick yourself for not getting it sooner. And if you shoot spherical, leveling doesn't matter a damn, because you can just reset the POV later to any direction within the sphere. Wavy horizons/tilted verticals are all easily repaired post-stitch with sphericals. Also, shooting in portrait is absolutely vital, because vertical coverage by tilting is often harder to achieve than horizontal coverage by rotation.

I only use a level to help me maintain position in space when shooting with the camera on a monopod/pole (i.e., to make sure the pole is perfectly perpendicular).

Different worlds of pano shooting, requiring very different techniques.