Panoramics are something of a rarity for me. I did one recently at Castle Acre shooting in vertical format, and due to parralax error I had quite a trial joining them together in CS2. A week ago we were in Norwich and popped into the Forum for a coffee. Inside the forum there there is Fusion a digital screen gallery. The screen is in a curve and measures 24metres wide x 2.5metres high, so any display that takes all that up is very impressive. On that day the pictures were all by Norfolk and Suffolk based photographers. Naturally due to the screen dimensions there were a lot of panoramas being shown. Over a cup of coffee I had a ponder about my experience. Bitten by those superb images I determined that I would have a go at panoramas, but it did have to be at little cost.
I cracked up when I saw the prices of Panoramic Heads
, but I had the bug now, so the question was how to do this for little spend. A trip to a hardware store and things were on the up when I bought a two orientation bubble level for 84pence.
Workshop time now, and I dug up a couple of offcuts of 40mm bar. With one I made a rotating base and the other I machined to form the base section. The rounded end has a dovetail cut into it so the bar that supports the camera is easily attatchable/detatchable yet solid when locked up. The base section has two threaded mounting holes, these are in line with the centre of the lens, so one is for the D2X and the other the D100. Now I realised I needed to align the point of rotation closer to the centre of the front element of the lens to eliminate parralax error. Luckily I have a Manfrotto 501 fluid head which has a sliding plate. Using this would also allow for tilt movement, so an advance on just using the single rotator, saved having to make another rotator for use at the camera mount. I did though have to make an additional base that could be really tightly screwed to the Manfrotto's sliding plate. The Manfrotto plates have rather high rubber inserts, and from previous experience you just cannot sufficiently compress that to avoid bounce with a single screw on a smallish foot. I still had to use the rotator in the final setup in order to align the bracket base when mounted. I was not clever enough to get both thread starts in exactly the same place on the base or I could have dispensed with it. It does make for easy mounting of a camera for normal tripod shooting, so I guess there are ups for some downs.
The 501 head is super stable and mounted on the 055 legs is good for general out and about. For serious stuff I would attatch it to my big Slick Proffessional with the 405 geared head. Lots of weight in that combo though.
So four days later and a bin full of swarf the result is in the attatched pic. All up cost probably around a fiver.
If the weather is on our side I will give it a bash tomorrow. Full of confidence that I do not have to modify it.
Now you know how come I have not been on WPF for a few days.
Don