I wanted to get some advice on RRS's panoramic equipment, specifically the Elements Pano Package (includes PCL-1 Precision panning base and MPR CL2 Nodal slider) that they sell for $360. The other product made by them that I was considering was the Ultimate Omni-Pivot package which is $440.

I'm looking for some advice on both the RRS product as well as alternatives. Is the elements package restrictive Long-term i think i'd be interested in the Ulimate Pro Omni Pivot, but at $800 that is a little pricey and a lot more then what i want to spend.. I woud like to stick with a product that uses an arca-swiss type mount/plates.

I don't have any experience in shooting digital panoramas right now, but am interested i getting into digitial stiching after being a little intimidated when i first got into digital last year. I do miss shooting panorama's since selling my xpan and so far during my first year in digital, i've pretty much limited myself to using canon's DPP.

I'd also like to know how difficult digital stiching is. I generally don't like spending a lot of time in the computer and have been very reluctant to learn Photoshop, as while I find DPP slow to work with, it meets my needs (raw conversion, sharpening, adjust wb/saturation/contrast, eliminate dust).

I'd also appreicate some advice on software (the easier and simpler to use the better).

Basically there are two types of stitching: single row and multiple rows. Single row can be done with the basic RRS packages. I don't have the names in mind but you basically need the base and the nodal point slider. Single row is when you pan the camera from left to right, shooting several frames, usually verticals to maximize pixel count and image height.

Multiple row requires the Ulimate Pro Omni Pivot package. Multiple rows means you are shooting frames from left to right, as described above, but then you tilt the camera up or down to shoot a second and usually a third row, continuing to shoot from left to right (or right to left, same thing) after you tilt the camera. For this you need two nodal sliders, hence the more complex and expensive setup. The cost doubles basically because you need twice as many parts as for single row. The final images consist usually of 15 or 18 images, 3x5 or 3x6 for a three row stitch. A longer lens is used and visualization of the complete image is best done with a wide angle prior to starting to shoot. The resulting stitch that I just described exceeds the resolution of scanned 4x5 film.

Note that you need a ballhead for ease of leveling either setup. it is not totally indispensable, but without a ballhead you have to adjust the height of the tripod legs which is way more difficult than just adjusting the ballhead. You also need a level on the ballhead. RRS ballheads have one and they are among the very best at this time.

Stitching is done in the pano-stitching software of your choice. PT GUI is one of the best

The Manfrotto/Bogen 555B Leveling Center Column for 055 Pro and 3021 Pro Tripods is very good to level the camera.

Click to view attachment

Thanks for the advice Alain! Does the PCL-1 Precision Panning base attach to the ballhead (I have the BH-55)?

Yes. Al RRS components are compatible with each other. The panning base replaces the plate attachment part of your ballhead (where you attach your camera with the camera plate). You unscrew the base you currently have and replace it with the panning base.

If you only do panoramas at infinity, with no close objects, you may be able to do away with the nodal slide since there wouldn't be parallax issues (no objects located in front of one another but instead all objects at infinity).

You can go this route, or, if you'd rather keep your BH-55's existing clamp, you can get RRS's PCL-DVTL piece and attach it to the bottom of your PCL-1. This gives the PCL-1 a dovetail that allows you to clamp it to your BH-55. The PCL-DVTL is relatively cheap (for RRS, anyway), lightweight, low-profile, and in my experience works quite well.

Hope this helps!

Chris/Alain,
Thanks for your advice!!

I would second Alain's advice about RRS. They make very high quality well designed "stuff" and are very helpful over the phone.

I also struggled with which pieces/packages to use (was there a less expensive combination), and in the end wound up with the equivalent of their Ultimate Pro Omni Pivot Pkg. Their catalog is a bit confusing in that it has all the possible pieces as well as packages.

This might help: I do stitched landscape photography in the Arizona backcountry with a D-200 with the heaviest lens being 70-200/2.8. The D-200 has the RRS L-plate attached. I have a carbon fiber tripod with the BH-40 ball head with the PCL-1 permanently mounted. This makes both leveling quick and a good panning base. Then the RRS: MRP-192, CDR rail, PCL-1 (for vertical panning) and the MPR-CL 2 nodal slide.

I find setup to be quick and sure, movements smooth, and quite important, no drooping or slippage once positioned.

I use PTAssembler software from Max Lyons. For me it yields superb high resolution images. It's only $40 and Max has a very active and well supported on-line forum. I don't know other software, but I suspect that stitched photography could fairly be termed "craftsmanship intensive", i.e. the more time and skill invested, the better the result.

Mike Coffey

I tried stitching two images in a single row with PS, and found the result horrible. The two images were shot without a pano head, but were on a tripod, with the same exposure/focus and overlapping by 40%+. Not sure if the problem was due to hw or sw.

There are many online tutorials on home-brew pano heads, but I have yet to try any.

My understanding is that the best pano-stitching software is based on Pano Tools. PT GUI (costs a little more), PTAssembler and Hugin (freeware) are all frontends based on PT. I tried Hugin and didn't get too far with it. The documentation is insufficient for me to understand the UI.

I would appreciate comparisons between PT GUI and PTAssembler from those who have used both.

Get the software first, try it out, and then buy the gear.

I've done a ton of stitching, mainly to feed 30,000 pixel wide images to my iPF5000 at 600 dpi to get a 17" X 50" print with incredible detail, with very little enlargement. So I end up taking a panorama of 3 rows say of 16 shots for each row, of one oak tree, with a 85mm lens, rather than shooting that same oak with one frame at 17mm from roughly the same distance. This is the image, scaled massively down:

Notice the two yellow grass reeds at the bottom right standing up about 1/3-way into the shot. These were on about 8 of the frames shot (multi-row, and you ahve to overlap shots) so this shows you how good the software is at multi-row panoramas.

My equipment for this shot?
1) a tripod
2) a RRS BH-40 Ballhead
3) D200 with 85 1.4 lens and polarizing filter.

Now - I am going to say something heretical here: You may not need specialized gear. The software is just that good. You can shoot a multi-row panorama hand-held, if you're reasonably careful, with great results esp if you're shooting far-away objects (i.e. not much you're shooting is physically near you in the foreground.

My advice in sequential order:
1. Before you buy any equipment at all, download PT-Gui, and also download and install (i.e. expand into the right directory and set up in the options) the SmartBlendplug-in. Then go out, and hand-held, shoot a 3-image pano (by taking three shots with say 25% overlap) and use the stitching software to stitch it all together.
2. Then shoot using your tripod and the panning base on your ballhead, and stitch some 5 image sets.
3. use your ballhead to do a 2-row 5 shot set, and stitch that.

By the time you do this, you will start to see several things:
1. In most cases, you don't need specialized equipment anymore unless you're shooting something pretty close to you. The special equipment allows the camera to rotate along the nodal point of the lens, so you don't get parallax issues, but good software like the smartblend plug-in all but obviates the need for that.

And then, if you find that you're serious, spend the $$ with RRS.

I bought a nodal ninja with my d200 setup, and get serious creep and saggage with that setup (D200, RRS l-bracket with mb-200 grip loaded with 2 batteries, + say a 85 1.4 lens. But that just means that it takes me longer to shoot, as you have to wait for the camera to settle down to eliminate shake for every frame of say a 35 frame shoot, and a remote and mirror-lock-up are a must.

Additionally, many people are reporting that some lenses like the nikon 70-200 2.8 has a nodal point very close to where the lens collar sits anyways.

Get the software, try it out, and then buy the gear.

The nodal point varies a lot according to the focal lenght with that lens.

At around 120 mm, it is reasonnably close to the collar location.

Regards,
Bernard

off topic a bit.
i just got interested in this panorama stuffs and started researching about it. and just learnt that what we're calling the "nodal point" is a misconception - although it's not that serious.
it's actually called the "entrance pupil".

i found it here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_plane
although i'm not sure how accurate the info is.

That's indeed correct, but the difference is kind of academic...

Cheers,
Bernard

Horizontal panos are common, but I find vertical panos can be dramatic. Does the RRS basic setup also work for a single column stitch?

Thanks for your "heretical" comments with great context to support them, we need more of this kind.

Many like their wide angle (or pano) landscape images to include some prominent foreground objects to emphasize scale and distance. My understanding is that pano heads can help stitching this kind of shots. Do you happen to have more such examples to demo no pano heads are needed?

As an aside, there are quite a few tutorials on how to build you own pano heads.

where are the tutorials on building pano heads? any help would be greatly appreciated.
i am especially interested in building a head with no right angles as this is a great nurturer of vibration. my current approach is a tublar swept arm like on the wimberlys but having it U shaped so there is support on both sides and mounting for the lens on a quick release plate on the bottom of the swinging part. i also am trying to intergrate 120/1 worm gears that i bought on ebay and stops every 5 degrees like on the manfrotto 300N.
is anyone else exploring these things?
thanks,
vincent

I've had great results without all the fancy nodal equipment
I use a leveling tripod and a panning base
since most of my subjects are more than 100' away the software does a great job
I've stitched handhelds with good results
I prefer PTGui
I think the advice, buy the software first is good
Marc

This one was handheld, in the program mode and I was a bit hypoxic! Everything done wrong!
Click to view attachment

I agree that the software should come first - you probably don't need a pano head for distant subjects. (or try this method: Philopod)

Google for things like panorama head, nodal point, entrance pupil, etc, and you'll find lots of homebrew examples. Study manufacturer's photos (RRS, 360 Precision, Manfrotto 303, etc.) to get ideas. McMaster-Carr is one source for bearings & such if you're concerned about precision.

I have a lathe and mill, and after a couple prototypes, I ended up buying the RRS kit. It's collapsible, multi-camera friendly, and the parts are multi-functional. The work involved in building something better than the RRS was not worth it to me.

As for geared positioning, I believe that I'm within .5mm for all my dimensions, which is easy enough to eyeball on the 1mm scale on the RRS slide - accurate enough for very challenging stitches.

Also, it's useful to have two-axis panning even for single row panoramas. This lets you pan a single row with the camera pointed down, for example. (Kind of like the tilting platform for the old Cirkut cameras)

Here's a single-row, tilted down with close foreground objects:
Click to view attachment

RRS is very straightforward about the fact that their pano parts are not meant for longer or heavier telephoto lenses. is anyone using a 1 series body and a 300mm lens? is the RRS plc-1 clamp suitable for heavier bodies and lenses? RRS is telling me they are not.
does anyone know of a good website that is helpful in reducing vibration in the design of a head? yesterday a wildlife shooter who i highly regard pointed out the evils of right angles in the design of camera support. i think this is sound mechanical engineering.
i've been building pano heads using bent 1/4"X1 1/2' aluminum and the vibratiobn is substantial. i really think it's worth my time to make a pattern and have it cast in the interest of having something i will enjoy using.
thanks,
vincent

Vincent,
With a 300 mm lens, I seriously doubt you need any additional equipment beyond some means of panning



This was 5 verticals with a 300 simply panned (I've no idea whewre the "nodal" point is for this lens). No pano software used, and very little geometry adjustment in PS (possibly none, I can't recall absolutely)

Andy

The heaviest I use is a D2x + 70-200. I'm more of a wide-angle shooter, so can't help you there


That's a big subject - Take a look here:
Beam Bending Examples
Design Handbook Index also has tons of information.

Have fun!

thanks this is very useful. i see that i should forget about aluminum and start thinking about steel.
i have done a good number of panos in the past year where i'm stitching 100-200 shots using my 70-200mm lens and a one armed L bracket on a manfrotto 300N rotator. the 300N has 4,6,8,12,15,18,24,36 and 72 stop increments. it's when you get below 5 degree increments that things get complicated.
a 300mm lens is 6.9X4.6 degrees
a 400 is 5.2X 3.4 degrees
and a 500 is 4.1X2.7 degrees
so building in some mechanical means of incramenting the rotation on the shots is one of the things i'm trying to figure out. especially with waterfall shots where good regular overlap is important.
i already have commissions for these 20 foot plus murals so i do need to work this out.
thanks again,
vincent

It depends, but aluminum will probably be stiffer & lighter than steel for this kind of thing. The cross-sectional shape of your parts is the most important. For example, a tube will be stiffer and larger than a solid rod for a given cross-section area. For a given stiffness, a tube will be lighter and larger than a solid rod.

For those kinds of increments, it may be more practical to get a higher-resolution camera. Check out machine tool dividing heads and turntables/goniometers for some ideas, though. High-precision no-backlash positioning gets expensive fast.
Homemade Rotary Table
Suruga Goniometers

Alan, your suggestions are really helpful to me. a tubular U shaped yoke is what i'm inclined to. and i'm keeping an eye on small rotary tables on ebay.
again, my gratitude
vincent

Good luck with your project - please post some photos of what you come up with!

I've done a lot of multiple row/columns panos with both my 1Ds Mk II as well as a Mamiya ADF II. I have been using the RRS ultimate omni-pivot package with great results. I lock the omni-pivot to RRS PCL-1 panning clamp.

The tripod must be dead-on level then the camera but be level - two seperate operations. You also need to the noal point for the lens you're using. All camera functions must be on manual and no filter used. Once I have the desired setup I don't touch the camera, instead I use an electronic shutter release and the large knob on the panning clamp to turn the camera.

Remember to shoot left to right. So far the largest pano I've done to date is 3 rows by 8 colums overlapping about 50-60% of Horseshoe Bend in Page AZ. Be prepared for a huge file! But then again that's why I have 8gig of RAM!

The very fact that you're asking for another shot above means that I didn't need a pano head ;-)

I know I could have done better on the example image, shooting the ground right in front of me, but because even with 8 GB of RAM loading a 3GB photoshop image takes a while, I was lazy. But here you are:

This is a crop of an image (jpg transfer is pretty dark from ProPhoto RGB unfortunately) where I used a nikon d200 with a 50 1.4 shooting the ground about 4 feet in front of me from 56" high or so, with a regular ballhead. This represents about 4 frames, downsized, out of a 2-row 16 frame each with about 1/3 overlap (low light low detail shots are harder to stitch some times) between shots and rows.


I realize that it is hard to tell, but in my original post there are two tall grass reeds which were 3 feet from me. They are blurry.

In the original posts' shots they are present in about 8 frames. Each frame has them in a different place, because I was not using an "omni-pivot" type of panoramic head, so the camera was rotating about the film plane (i.e. the L-bracket was clamped into a regular ballhead) rather than the nodal point (or entrance pupil for the engineer types ;-) ).

If you use regular PTGui stitching, or any other type (i.e. have looked at photoshop etc. . ) you will end up with the lower part of those grass reeds all disjointed and indeed many copies of them side by side in an obvious kind of parallax effect. For an example, see this page ( SmartBlend.

The reeds will look like that pen, if not worse because this is a multi-row, so the bottom reeds will actually be detached from the second row, etc. .

Now, the smartBlend plug-in decides where to put the seams to eliminate that kind of effect, obviating the need, in MOST cases, for the $1000 pano head.

However, if you get very serious, and need to sell, or print very large, go ahead and invest in RRS, as it will require the software to do less work, and by extension you to do less work, and by extension, your world will be brighter, happier, and so on.

The very fact that you're asking for another shot means that I didn't need a pano head ;-)

But don't believe me - the software is free to download and try, and may take a little bit of effort to learn, but you can take shots enough in your own house to convince yourself of how it will work for you or not.

Please enjoy!

Why left to right? Does it matter which direction or which order, if there is no movement like cloud movement? How about a multi-row pano? Do you do left to right then zig back to the left and do the second row left to right or do you jog up or down (as the case may be) and do the second row right to left?

In my setup and software usage, left to right has zero bearing on anything. Your choice of how to shoot depends on the situation.

i.e. you have to try to get the edges of the images to match, and hopefully more than the edge in order to get each image to warp efficiently, and then blend efficiently.

So if the clouds are blowing right to left, you will be better off following them and shooting the scene quickly right to left.

If you're at the beach in the wave zone, get the rhythm of the sets, and shoot like mad when the water has drained!

If you're shooting at Dawn or Sunset, shoot with the trend so you're not "swimming upstream" and artificially increasing the color/luminosity gradient. i.e. sunrise shoot the lightest part of the sky first, and sunset shoot the darkest part first, if you want to make it more uniform, and reverse if you want an exaggerated gradient. Keep in mind this also depends on the speed of your shots, which explains why $1000 is a good investment (stability and settling time after adjustments) if you need to shoot a certain light - and who of us doesn't want just that right moment in time?

If there's nothing changing in the 10 minutes you will do your shot, then it really doesn't matter - but you ought to keep to some order just in case there are shots that don't have good identifying features so you can get them positioned well later.

The advice about filters, manual exposure in that post etc. . IMHO is good for beginners, but is of little use once you're aware of what you're doing.

For instance - if you're shooting a very wide field of view with a polarizing filter, you may have to rotate the filter to get the right hue in the sky at the extremes of right and left, and you must know what you're doing and have a good eye to pull that off.

Or, if you're shooting a vertical of a tree, you will soon learn that you either will end up not only altering the exposure for each shot, but also altering the focus of the lens in order to keep the tree in focus and at a constant level of exposure. The ground is usually dark, and the sky will usually have more light, but you had better keep the tree at some even exposure (i.e. the trunk had better have some decent range of exposure unless you go the HDR route or you will end up with a very dark base and a blown crown).

The golden rule: You have to blend, so adjust so that all the shots have the object of interest in constant 1) focus, 2) exposure 3) etc. .

For beginners, it's easiest to start with a set manual exposure, set focal point (turn autofocus off), and no filters until you get to know what will work for you. Then throw all of that junk out and do what's right to get your shot, just like you learned and un-learned when you first started shooting cameras in the first place ;-)

Here are some examples of homemade pano heads. They seem flimsy but may be perfectly fine for a point and shoot digicam, or a dslr with a wide angle. Someone with machining tools can create a much sturdier one. These sites also have many great pano tutorials. DISCLAIMER: I have NOT built any of these.

http://www.worth1000.com/tutorial.asp?sid=161123&print=1

http://www.bryanhansel.com/grandmarais/index.php?p=128

http://www.dffe.at/panohead/index-e.html

http://www.tawbaware.com/maxlyons/panhead_d60.htm

Here's one on nodal point:

http://www.kaidan.com/nodalpoint.html

Thanks for the second example. I did notice the weeds in the first example. They are stitched straight, which means vertical alignment is handled well, but does not demo how horizontal alignment is handled. It is harder to access how well the waves in the second example are stitched in either direction, since I have no reference how they should look like to begin with. For this reason, even if these waves are "off" after stitching, they won't be noticed by a viewer. A much better example is a small hut in the foreground with mountains and fine foliage in the distant background. We can then tell whether the hut's roof/walls are straight, etc. Sorry to sound critical, but that's what I meant in an earlier post that a "set" of such "standardized" images would be critical for comparing different tools.



I did spend some time trying PS and Hugin and found them both unsatisfacory for different reasons. Before investing time in yet another tool, I want to have a better handle which one to tackle. Seems like PTGui is the next one on the list.

http://www.hdrjapan.com/sitemap/

This was shot with a 24mm (verticals) 5-shots across/7 deep with a Gitzo tripop and an Arca Swiss Head.

it seems to me the answer for long lenses shooting a matrix, that the Wimberley head is the answer. you can put a long RRS rail on the lens to get the nodal point (if that's important - i normally don't have enough depth of field to make the nodal point important with a long lens, but i guess if you're really patient you could do a Panorama with Helicon Focus).

the only thing missing from the Wimberley are horizontal and vertical scales which you should be able to satisfactorily improvise

i don't think you can possibly build something this effective for anything like the price -- and better yet, Wimberley will loan you one to try for the cost of shipping!

i just got a mongoose M3.5 http://www.4gdphoto.com/catalog/index.php?...&products_id=67
and it by far is the nicest smoothest most versatile pano head i have ever used and i've owned several kaidan, nodal ninjas and homegrown rigs.
IT'S 1.4lbs! it had a 2 7/8" distance from the AS plate face to the Y axis so it is perfect for many collared lenses. i put a manfrotto 3001 index head under it and an acratech leveler under that.
4th generation designs say it will support a 500mm f4 or a 300mm 2.8 easily.
i use a RRS MPR-CL rail with a blocked up AS clamp for vertical panos with wider lenses.
the smooth positive lock without shifting is a joy.
vincent