Nodal Ninja NN3 MK II
Some months ago now I bought Lee Frost’s Panoramic Photography out of curiosity to be honest. I knew I had a passing interest in panoramic photography and I had read quite a few things online about, however, there really is no substitute for a good book. There are some great shots in there and some good advice. Unfortunately it is mainly aimed at shooting panoramic photographs with film - something I have no intention of doing.
Whilst shooting panoramas digitally is arguably more complex than using a specialised film camera, the ability to employ much more experimental and contemporary post-processing is particularly appealing to me. Photo stitching software is getting pretty good these days and on a fairly recent trip to Norfolk I tried my first hand-held panorama. There is clearly some distortion but I was pleased with this first attempt as I was stood on the top a sand dune having no real idea of what i was doing. The theory was sound and it forced some more research.
Much of the sane advice suggests using a tripod (obviously) as that should make the job of stitching a lot easier, but for the best results it is sensible to invest in a proper panoramic tripod head. There are a few on the market these days but I kept reading good things about the Nodal Ninja NN3 MK II. There only seems to be a few retailers selling this kit in the UK, so I got mine from Red Door. The Nodal Ninja is a specially designed spherical tripod head allowing the photographer to adjust a camera/lens “entrance pupil” [nodal point] exactly over its correct rotational axis. This helps to eliminate parallax error inherent when shooting multiple images side by side. This all sounded fascinating, if a little baffling, but I still ordered one.
Nodal Ninja NN3 Mk II kit
Thankfully it all came pre-built and I only had to attach the lower and upper arms. This is easy and it was fairly simple to set up the correct setting for my camera/lens combo. There are numerous places online that have sample setups and the correct distances to set both arms at.
One of the key features of this head is the ability to shot 360 degree panoramas with ease, and this was the clincher for me. Arguably the best lenses to use to shoot 360 panos are fisheye lenses as you ultimately need to take less shots. Fortunately I have the wonderfully titled Tokina AT-X 107 DX Fisheye. God knows what made Tokina make a 10-17mm fisheye zoom, but never mind; on my D200 it gives 180 degrees of coverage at 10mm and with some decent overlapping of shots this means I can do a 360 pano is 12 shots (probably less when I get a bit more used to the whole process).
I have only taken a handful of shots so far, and one of the first is included below. After doing some reading I decided to give Autopano Pro a try and it seems a lot adept at this sort of thing than Photoshop’s photomerge feature. This image was 12 shots at 10mm in Mote Park, Maidstone, Kent.
It had been a couple of years since I had made this far into Mote Park and this little building has been on my photo to-do list for a long time. However, the reason I picked this location was mainly because I have also become fascinated with the creation of ‘little planets’ - wrapping 360 degree shots in on themselves, creating the effect below.
There is a good tutorial on on how to create these here.
Not content with two different results from the one photos (ok 12 photos), I also wanted to explore the potential for interactive panoramas. These have been used for a while in the tourism industry and now most venues wanting to show off their facilities are using them. Some net searching pointed me at Pano2VR by Garden Gnome Software. This is a really nice, simple and well built piece of software and being available for the Mac and Linux made me smile. Anyway, here is the same shot rendered as an interactive experience.
To view this larger click here. The experiments shall continue.
