Sorry Ben, but what you talk about the nodal point is not correct. It's not about turning the camera around the plane of the sensor but around the nodal point of the lens.
Hi Andreas, I have done some further reading and the nodal point seems to be different for every lens and varies for zoom lenses, as you point out. What a complicated mess! Luckily I was shooting distant subjects, so it hasn’t had any influence on the final results by rotating around the centre of the sensor. But I appreciate you pointing this out to me and others.
@@benharveyphotography Yes, the nodal point not only varies from lens to lens but also changes when you zoom the lens. It's usually at about the position where the first glas element of your lens is (also called entrance pupil of your lens). I did detail testing for my lenses which i use for panoramic images (and therefore exactly how I have to position the slider to have the correct nodal point when using those lenses). But I have to confess that most of the time I do not even bring the slider with me and shoot handheld (or using the tripod without nodal point adapter). As long as you ensure that very close objects are just in one of your stitching photos (and there is no overlap into the nearby photo) it even works fine for close objects. I often position such close objects in the first or the last image.
@andreaspetershtc thank you for correcting me - it is important to get it right if you have close up subjects as you say. It is surprising that digital cameras don’t have in camera stitching yet but phones do?
@@benharveyphotography Some cameras (e.g. the old Sony A7II or the a-mount A99II) have such in camera panorama stiching (but they are just producing JPG files and do not support RAW)
@andreaspetershtc I had this thought when considering in camera focus stacking and of course, it is no longer a raw file if the camera is merging together multiple files, so you cant have raw panoramic stitching or raw focus stacking. It would be nice though!
Panorama refers to shape, not technique. This is actually a technique called compositing. Panning only works if the base of you psn in a level plane. Ballheads are bad at the best of times, most of them fail as soon as you want to make a second layer. A few have a panning feature at the top. I have been using video heads for some time, but those don't level side to side. Good for panning though, and I would think ideal for birds in flight. I use a levelling base. Many are like a separate ballhead, they go between tripod and your head of choice. Some have three screws to adjust for level. Some photographers add a panning device to the top of the head. Whatever the head, once it's level, you ignore that and pan level or tilted Nodal devices are useful only at close quarters. Forrest Tanika explained that many years ago. When you make a landscape image, you are taking a section of the inside of a netball (Go Diamonds!) and representing it as flat. Using wider lenses emphasises that, I don't think the distortion most photographers complain about has anything to do with the lens. Using a narrower lens takes smaller chunks, it might smooth the effect, but the end result is the same. Stand at the edge of a straight road or rail track. Shoot a panorama with your widest lens, road left and right both in the final shot. Do the same wit your widest lens. Process as usual, crop to the same area and compare the results on your computer, switching between the two.
Great video Ben, and excellent tips on the capturing process. Plus bonus points for filming yourself in anamorphic without help! As for stitching, I'm personally a bit torn about the automatic process as sometimes they can rotate some frames a tad to line-up better, but in doing so, portions of the pano can become a little less detailed than the rest. I've noticed this using Photoshop on some of mine, so have returned to a completely manual stitch where you reduce the opacity of each new layer to line them up, then make a freehand wavy or jagged crop of the edges so there's less of an obvious line where they overlap. You also may need to do some cloning here and there, but the result is consistent detail and resolution across the pano. Also you may need to manually touch-up any pano if there was a moving subject within it like a car, plane, or bird, or even a pesky hiker! It might be fun to do a follow-up comparing a completely auto stitch vs a manual one, and for the auto ones, talking about mapping onto cylindrical, spherical shapes etc and how you should choose based on the capturing technique. You could also mention an optical shift pano! Anyway, bottom line is that South Downs pano is gorgeous and one of your best images!
Thanks Gordon, you are right there is a lot still to cover with this topic. I didn’t mention using a shift lens to achieve more resolution and a wider perspective.
Thanks again Ben, I find the wide range of photographic subjects you cover in your videos interesting, entertaining and educational. Quality stuff mate, thank you 🙂
I like your idea to use a somewhat normal focal length lens, 50mm, to make the panos. I hadn’t given that much thought before but it makes excellent sense. I also like the anamorphic look and it helps give a little different view than most other videos. It’s nice to have some variety sometimes.
The focal length of around 50mm upwards makes sense once you think about it. I have tried to stitch together wide angle photos before and they just don’t look right. There aren’t many anamorphic RU-vid videos out there, I think I will make some more - I enjoyed the challenge of it.
in a perfect world you take the shots as fast as possible but now you will introduce shake....so take a deep breath in between shots! another great video Ben! Keep these coming!
Nice video Ben. I spent some time doing panoramas some time back and sprung for a nodal focusing rail and a tripod leveling head and some other hardware. In the end, I rarely pull that stuff out anymore because I can generally do a good job hand held.
I haven’t actually used a Nodal focusing rail, since you have done both, other than convenience, is there a benefit in using the proper kit when you look at the results?
@@benharveyphotography the primary thing I recall is that all the image section of the panorama line up better, i.e. less empty space above or below the image, particularly if everything is level and you've done a decent job of getting the camera set up on the Nodal point of the lens (back then I was just using near and far points and making sure they stays superimposed when I moved the camera). But, this was way before content aware fill which really, in my opinion, takes care of the problem. Given the general inconvenience of it, I don't see reverting.
Thank you Kevin. Do you ever stitch images together for fine art? Some long exposures? I can see the movement in the clouds being an editing challenge.
I've done a few pano stitches before, but not with any long exposure captures for the very reason you've just mentioned… it would be a editing headache probably. @@benharveyphotography
@kevinholliday2066 I just had the privilege of using a medium format Fuji 100MP camera and you could easily crop this to a pano format and have an amazing quality image remaining. But you wound;t benefit from the compression and wide perspective that you get when stitching images together in this way.
Ahh Ben I really enjoyed this as the locations are so familiar and it's always interesting to explore other photographer's thought processes. I took a single shot at that locationand made that into a 3 x 1 pano but the size won't be anything compared to yours but it prints off well at the size I want it to. And your vlogging camera held focus fairly well! Thank you.
This does beg the question, if I don’t print this pano will the resolution ever be appreciated. Sounds like an interacting comparison. Could you see the difference between a printed 30MP photo that is cropped and a 200MP stitched image that is printed the same size, say A2 size?
Excellent! Maybe I should try this again with better software, for personal projects. Was quite an ordeal 20 years ago. I like the example of hand-held results. Your stability for eleven shots is impressive. I like the anamorphic ratio quite a bit, nice look. Hope you think it was worth the trouble. I like a geared head for this sort of stuff too, FWIW. Maybe I have used the wrong ball heads in the past. Lovely location and good advice.
Cheers Brian, glad you liked the video - it was hard work making it but I enjoy the challenge. Do have a go yourself, I am sure you have lots of lovely panoramic views where you are :-)
Ben, yet again a very well-presented, educational, yet entertaining/easy-to-watch video. It may be as you suggested, time to bring in Cloe as an occasional focus-puller on any future anamorphic wide-screen videos. I wonder if she would be interested in making a short video critiquing what you have just presented to the world.
Cheers Chris, I think Chloe would have been very helpful in the making of this video. She enjoys being outdoors but not interested in photography on a serious level - so I don’t push it upon her. She takes photos on her phone as you might expect and she is very creative - and comes up with some great ideas for my videos sometimes.
Hi Joseph, I couldn’t justify the full frame version so I have the Sony APS-C version which you can using the in camera clear image zoom to about 1.3 and the bug netting goes away. I have the 50mm and now the 24mm version and enjoy working with them so much. It’s a real challenge but quite a unique look. I got the lenses from MPB
Hi Joseph, this video was editing in Final Cut Pro, I simply changed the proportions of the video to correct the 1.33 squeeze factor and then created a preset to paste the priorities to all of the files. I have also done the same in Premiere pro just this month for another video, so it is possible in most software. If you are thinking of having a go at this yourself you can connect your camera to an app called monitor+ and it will apply LUTS and desqueeze the footage for you to see exactly what the image looks like once you have ‘fixed’ the footage in software later. If you don’t already know they make different squeeze factors, both of my lenses are 1.33 squeeze which I think is the sweet spot for watching content back on a mobile device of a computer/tv screen. Whereas the cinema you could go even wider!
Hi Ben, thank you for the information. I have been thinking about purchasing a cine lens, but I wasn't if II wanted the anamorphic or a lens like the night walker.@@benharveyphotography
@josephmurad1134 hi. It depends if you want autofocus or not and if you intend on using full frame or full frame in crop Mode. All anamorphic lenses are manual focus and I enjoy the challenge, but they mostly have a challenging minimum focusing distance and you have to use close focusing glass on the front to be less than a metre. But they have a certain look, you get lens flares and oval bokeh. If none of that matters then get a spherical lens and enjoy autofocus and an easier life. At least with modern lenses you have the luxury of focus peaking, the option to use an app or an external monitor and other focusing aids.
I do have a 24mm tilt shift lens, and I didn’t cover the shifting option in this video, BUT 24mm doesn’t provide the compression that I get when shooting with a longer focal length and stitching those together. Tilt shift lenses do provide enough coverage for maybe 2-3 images stitched together, but this pano was made up of quite a few photographs which I would prefer as an output.
Many mistakes in the video especially over nodal point in camera when it varies from lens and focus length used It’s a nice guide but not exactly comprehensive I’d suggest watching Ewan dunsmuir & Lester picker videos as they are more experienced and knowledgeable
