Build your own pano-head

IMPORTANT UPDATE -> The BoneHead, a custom built pano-head

I have been taking panoramas for a long time always hand-holding the camera, I quickly noticed how hard it is to do this in a small ambient. To avoid strong parallax errors the only solution is using a panoramic head. There are many professional (as much professional as expensive) pano-heads out there, you can check this list. I decided to build my own mainly for these reasons:

  1. it’s much much cheaper
  2. it’s smaller and lighter
  3. it’s custom, sized for my camera and lens, it won’t need any further configuration

In fact with such a small rotator (the tube itself), the nadir shot (the one downward) will be much better and clearer than with the other pano-heads.
There are of course also cons, as a lower precision and.. stop! Following are different pictures that should explain how I did. I did not write a complete tutorial since the materials and the techniques highly depend on want you can get at your local store :D. By the way the hardest part was fixing the screw inside the aluminum tube, that has been achieved by putting the screw inside a wider screw (cold have been plastic or cork) and fixing it all with a pin. Remember to find the nodal point of your lens before starting building it! If you have any question please post a comment.

Inspiration has been taken from these very good examples of homemade panoramic heads:

UPDATE -> The BoneHead, a custom built pano-head

One Response to Build your own pano-head

  1. Pingback: Detect the nodal point of your lens [How to] | Some Little News

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> <pre lang="" line="" escaped="" highlight="">

Home
Twitter Facebook Flickr Vimeo About me Email me