The World of
James Carroll

PANORAMA: A picture or series of pictures representing a continuous scene. (Some people would qualify this by requiring a picture to be at least twice as wide as it is high).

The simplest way of producing a panorama is to take a photograph at a distance and/or with a wide angle lens, then crop it down to a letterbox shape. My panoramas are created by stitching together several frames from an Olympus C5000Z digital camera.

My Learning Experience

(Click on small image to open a larger version in a new window.)

Leisure Centre Nature Reserve
This is my first ever panoramic photograph. It was taken hand held, just to see how the Panorama mode on my Olympus C5000Z worked. It was automatically stitched in the Camedia software provided with the camera. I used Paint Shop Pro 7 to do a little cloneing in the sky to cover some distortion and cropped the picture. It is not a particularly photogenic scene but it hooked me on panoramas!

Our Famous Norman CastleYes this is my second attempt! This time I at least had the wit to put the camera on a tripod. I used PTAssembler and Panorama Tools to stitch it together.
For those not familiar with the scene, The right side of the photo looks over the harbour. Just to the right of the yellow tractor you can see the bow and cabin of a fishing boat.

Railway Station
I'm still learning. There are a couple of things wrong here. I have by this time made myself a pano head of sorts, but it has no tilt feature - at least none that will maintain the camera at its' nodal point. For this reason the tops of the chimneys are lost. The geography is such that I could get no further back and I think this is why the building seems to be bent away from the viewer. It is not apparent from this low res. picture, but the two right most frames are stitched through the Name Plate and there is noticable distortion there.
Lesson learned: Plan where the frames will be stitched to avoid this sort of problem.

Why do I need a Panoramic Head?

Well, perhaps you don't! My first couple of panoramas were taken hand held and it worked OK. If you only intend to try a few expirements or to take the odd scene on holiday, you can get by without a panoramic head provided that:
1. There are no objects too close to cause obvious parallex problems.
2. You are careful how you pan the camera. (see Virtual Pano Head)
3. You don't expect to get perfect results.

Nodal points and moving bars. Do not worry about the jargon, here is a short video on setting up a panoramic head.

Simple DIY head.

This is my prototype. It is made from mahogany recycled from an old door. The large knob was made necessary because the wood is too thick to use a normal tripod screw. The two slots seen below the knob, give Side to side movement to allow the center of the camera lens to be placed exactly over the centre of rotation. This only needs to be done once.

The unit made up of the horizontal and vertical plates, slides forward and backward on the black bar (salvaged from an old flashgun mount). This allows the nodal point of the lens to be placed over the centre of rotation. The nodal point changes depending on the zoom setting of the lens. So far I have always used the widest setting, so I have not needed to move the camera.

I have fixed an aluminium plate to the bottom of the disc and drilled and tapped it to take the standard tripod screw so that the whole unit can easily be mounted and dismounted. I carry a small spirit level and once I find the spot where I want to shoot from all I need do is level the base of the panoramic head and snap away.

This simple head has several small flaws.
There is no facility to place the camera in landscape orientation nor to tilt it about the nodal point. The rotation disk is not calibrated and has no click stops for even overlaps of the images. It is possible to tilt the camera about the tripod bush in its' base. In fact, you can see this in picture 1, but this requires the fore/aft position to be adjusted as well. I will probably not get round to actually making Version II for some time as I am enjoying this little baby even with its' shortcomings.