I went to the local camera shop to buy the small auxiliary grip for my Fujifilm X-Pro1 and look for an affordable panorama plate. As the tripod mounting hole on the X-Pro1 is not aligned with the lens, but with the grip it is, I just bought a cheap Manfrotto sliding plate assembly to adjust the nodal point of the camera for panoramas, instead of anything fancier (for the time being).
After I got home I started the work of finding the nodal point on the 18mm lens, by aligning some ceiling posts with door frames etc. Suddenly is occurred to me that a carpenter's laser level could be useful in finding the nodal point fast: I aligned the vertical level laser beam so that it just touched the side of a post and positioned the camera so that the post just barely blocked the beam from the lens. Now, by turning the camera left and right I could right away see if the red laser dot started to show from behind the vertical post. Using a small aperture to make sure the laser power on the sensor is small I adjusted the plate so that there was no change in the intensity of the tiny laser spot peaking behind the post on the LCD.
Next I aligned the vertical laser with the front of the lens shade (shooting the laser from 90 degrees to the side), and marked the place (gouged the black paint off with a knife) where the end of the shade should be in relation of the sliding plate base. Job done.
