Nodal Ninja 3 Panoramic Head review
Having been interested in photography and in particular scenic photography for many years, the one area that I have avoided is panoramic images. Of course I have shot and printed panoramic photos but they have never been anything other than average, plus the work required to combine and process the images has been time consuming and painful. Getting all the images to line up without needing to spend hours at the computer has always put me off, ultimately this is the main reason I have allowed panoramic photography to pass me by. This all changed recently thanks to Bill Bailey at NodalNinja.com who kindly gave me the opportunity to review their Nodal Ninja 3 Panoramic tripod head.
A little about panoramic photography
Alabaster Church - Switzerland. 38 Images stitched together to make the final image.
The aim is to be able to shoot a sequence of shots, usually anything from 2 or more but typically 6 or more and then combine them in to one seamless photograph (and/or a QuickTime Virtual Reality movie QTVR or some other ‘real time’ tour) using one of the many capable software packages. To give yourself and the software the best chance of combining the shots with minimum lining up and overlap problems (called parallax) it is essential to shoot all the frames from exactly the same point, rotating camera around the entrance pupil or no parallax point of the lens. Typically you would attach the camera to a tripod using the mount at the base of the camera body, with the lens protruding out in front. You would then take a shot, rotate your camera along an axis to the next shot, take that picture and continue until you have photographed the whole scene. The problem is that as you shoot and rotate the camera to the next position for each shot in the sequence, the camera doesn’t actually move that much but crucially, it’s the lens that does. This introduces the panoramic photographer’s biggest enemy - parallax.
This is the key to those stunning panoramic photographs; it is all in the ability to rotate the camera around the entrance pupil of the lens to eliminate parallax error. For that, you are going to need more specialised equipment.
Welcome to the world of panoramic heads
With panoramic heads the aim is to offset the camera body and ensure that the entry point of the light – usually called the ‘entrance pupil’ (sometimes called ‘nodal point’ or ‘no parallax point’) is maintained perfectly for all the images.
Entrance pupil This removes parallax and enables the easy and accurate combination of all your shots in to one seamless photograph. The entrance pupil varies depending on the camera and lens combination used but it is always found near the entry point of the lens (not in the camera body or sensor plane).
There are three main types of panoramic heads:-
1) Single row panoramic heads – designed to allow production of cylindrical panoramas.
2) Multi-row panoramic heads - designed to do the same as a single row but allow for a greater vertical coverage.
3) Spherical panoramic heads - designed to allow full 360 degree horizontal as well as 180 vertical up and down coverage, giving you a full spherical panorama.
It is worth noting that spherical panoramic heads can be used to shoot single or multi-row panoramas but single/multi-row heads cannot shoot true spherical images.
The Nodal Ninja 3 belongs to the last of the three - the more advanced spherical group.
Ok so now we know (a little) about the terms used and the issues we have to contend with in panoramic photography, let’s take a look at the Nodal Ninja 3’s construction, what you get in the package and how its design allows it to deal with these issues.