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Author Topic: Nodal point of lens for panoramas  (Read 2200 times)

cerett

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Nodal point of lens for panoramas
« on: February 05, 2015, 11:07:22 am »

How many of you are actually determining the nodal of your lens before shooting panoramas? I am getting mixed advice on this. Some say do it to eliminate parallax. Others say it really makes no difference in your images. Your thoughts?
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walter.sk

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Re: Nodal point of lens for panoramas
« Reply #1 on: February 05, 2015, 11:32:27 am »

If you are shooting landscapes with things in the foreground, such as bushes, trees, boulders, etc., the parallax will cause noticeable problems, ghosts, and difficulty stitching.  On the other hand, if you're shooting something like a landscape across a river, with just water in the foreground, it probably wouldn't matter.
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NancyP

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Re: Nodal point of lens for panoramas
« Reply #2 on: February 05, 2015, 11:57:08 am »

I have determined it, and have the NPP table for all my lenses as a file on my phone for quick look-up. But then I am a bit obsessive. If you don't have foreground, you can "free hand" shoot a panorama, and even the point-and-shoot cameras can manage to stitch up the indivdual shots.
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KMRennie

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Re: Nodal point of lens for panoramas
« Reply #3 on: February 05, 2015, 12:25:07 pm »

I seldom find stitching panoramas a problem and sometimes hand hold them. The attached file is a 6 shot stitch with a 14mm lens (21mm equivalent). The camera was on a tripod, upright on an L bracket, so rotating about the focal plane not the nodal point. I can find no ghosting in the 10,000 px by 4000px file. The nearest grasses are about 6 feet away. If I had foreground interest much closer than this then I would probably have problems that would require a great deal of fiddling but I find compostion difficult with panoramas like this so seldom try. Good luck. Ken
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Bart_van_der_Wolf

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Re: Nodal point of lens for panoramas
« Reply #4 on: February 05, 2015, 12:59:54 pm »

How many of you are actually determining the nodal of your lens before shooting panoramas?

Hi,

By predetermining the No-Parallax-Point (NPP), I can be confident that both near and far detail will stitch without any risk of parallax errors. This is especially important if the shot cannot be re-done, and if post-processing must be fast and without nasty surprises that will take time (=money) to camouflage.

For less critical subjects, even handheld shot may be stitchable (just use a lot of overlap between the tiles to improve the chance of success).

Cheers,
Bart
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Jim Kasson

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Re: Nodal point of lens for panoramas
« Reply #5 on: February 05, 2015, 01:07:47 pm »

For less critical subjects, even handheld shot may be stitchable (just use a lot of overlap between the tiles to improve the chance of success).

Bart's right. I use a tripod and the RRS pano rig sometimes, but a lot of my pano work is hand held. Here are two I made yesterday morning:







Jim


« Last Edit: February 05, 2015, 01:10:03 pm by Jim Kasson »
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Dave Pluimer

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Re: Nodal point of lens for panoramas
« Reply #6 on: February 05, 2015, 02:06:05 pm »

For single row panos, I don't think the the NP matters as much as it does for multi row. What is really critical is a dead-level pan. I can tell a significant difference just by the way PS stitches mine together now that I'm using a pan head (Arca-Swiss p0) vs the non-pan head that I had before. Processing time is in seconds versus minutes now. That tells me that a lot less math is going on in the background getting things all together.
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