Hello all, I have been wanting to get into more panoramic shooting and stitching shooting.
I was wondering if I need to get something special for stitching and will just a normal 12" inch rail work for panos?
I have seen a bunch of Rails lately on ebay and was wondering how they are different from the RRS pano plate?
Any suggestions.
Also if I will be stitching using medium format like the AFDII Mamiya, do I need any special size Stitching adaptors.
Any further information would be appreciated.
Thanks a lot,
Snook
PS> when stitching is it as important to be on the nodal as with shooting Pano's?
Thanks in advance!!
What do you mean by stitching and pano? To me, stitching is the act of putting separate images together (using software) into a panorama or a mosaic. A mosiac is just a multi-row panorama.
Panoramas can be created by:
1. Rotating the camera around the entrance pupil (some call it the nodal point, but it actually isn't)
2. The camera being shifted in relation to the lens.
3. The camera and lens shifted together horizontally (Orthographic )
1 & 3 could easily be done with a rail if you only want to do single row images. I don't think a rail will allow you to do mosaics.
Good stitching software can take any of the shooting types listed above and create panoramas/mosaics with different projections like spherical, cylindrical, Mercator, rectilinear, etc.
p.s. Orthographic images are the hardest to do well because of parallax. It is, however, the best way to create images of flat objects like paintings.