Gunzorro Offline Upload & Sell: On
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Please feel free to post any of your panos, or pano experiences. Any pano is essentially "Alt" no matter what gear you are using!
I've been having some very rewarding images with hand held panoramas, especially the recent use of the Zeiss Contax 50/1.4 lens on my 1Ds2.
This lead me to take the first step toward more refined and predictable panoramas on tripod, featuring a now obsolete (but near-new) Kaidan Quick Pan II QPU-2 indexing pano head at a great price on eBay.
The Kaidan company is now out of business, and the design is ancient by contemporary standards, coming from around the year 2000 (seems like so long ago in the Digital Era!). I have to be careful, since it is out of production, any replacement parts would have to be custom made. It came with no manual, so it's been interesting, to say the least!
One of the direct benefits is that its arrival has forced me to overhaul my trusty Manfrotto 3051 tripod to remove all slack or play, and most importantly and aggravatingly, to square up all the parts so that zeroing the tripod also zeros the head, which in turn zeros the panoramic plate with indexing. Sounds easy, until you have to figure and adjust by trial and error (hint -- the base tripod must be zeroed first).
That mission completed, I mounted the camera in the vertical position, and commenced firing, using the appropriate indents for various focal lengths. Trial and error again, but there are only so many choices (around 6). I'm only planning on single row panos, so that keeps things simpler for now.
I only estimated the nodal point got pretty good results. But for more exact overlaps of foreground objects, I would have to work with a grid to find the nodal point for all lenses I intend to use, and record the information. Still, just by guessing, based on other's published pano experience, I've got it in a useable setting already just by eye-balling the alignment.
This design is pretty good, but has been superceded by other brands like Kirk and Really Right Stuff, to name a few. Even Bogen/Manfrotto has an older style indexing system.
Following are some simple backyard examples of varous focal lengths and the use of different index settings, up to 20 per revolution for the full 360 pano with the 50mm Zeiss Contax lens. I believe the 100mmL segment was set on 32 per rev, using only a portion of 11 shots. Least shots was the 16mm was for frames at something like 12 per rev.
I'm still pretty green at this, but today's results are encouraging!
Mild PP in Lightroom 3 and PSE8.
Lenses used: Canon 16-35L (@16, 24 and 35), Zeiss 21/2.8 ZE, Zeiss 35/2 ZE, Zeiss Contax 50/1.4, Canon 50/2.5 Macro and Canon 100./2.8L Macro.
ISO 100, 1/400 @ f/8.
16L
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c80/gunzorro/16-16-web.jpg
21 ZE
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c80/gunzorro/21-Zeiss-24-web.jpg
24L
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c80/gunzorro/24-Canon-24-web.jpg
35 ZE
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c80/gunzorro/35-Zeiss-50-web.jpg
35L
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c80/gunzorro/35-Zeiss-35-web.jpg
50/1.4
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c80/gunzorro/50-Zeiss-web.jpg
50 Macro
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c80/gunzorro/50-macro-50-web.jpg
100L
http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c80/gunzorro/100L-100-web.jpg
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