For a number of years, I’d been on the road living in or out of my car and using a standard Canon DSLR to photograph the US National Parks to create wall art that could decorate my walls of those fellow fans of the US National Parks. While a standard 4×6 aspect ratio was able to capture plenty of awesome sights and do it well, lots of landscapes didn’t always fit well into a standard size photograph.
Somewhere online I saw a photo tour that focused on panoramic photography and started looking into it. In order to use my existing camera equipment that included a Canon 5D MK II, a 7D and a collection of lenses a software program the could stitch photos would be needed as well as a tripod head that would hold the lens and facilitate shooting multi-row panoramic images.
When looking around for companies that made panoramic tripod heads, I came across Nodal Ninja. I really couldn’t tell the equipment of one pano company from another but Nodal Ninja looked like they made relatively good equipment that would enable my to use a 50MM Canon Lens to a 70-200 f/2.8 II and most anything in between. I spent about $700 on a setup that was a little better than what they recommended and was soon attempting to learn how to use it all to create panoramic shots that ranged from as few as three stitched shots to close to 300 shots stitched together.
While many or most people seek to capture a panoramic scene with as few shots as possible, I often tried to capture it with as many shots a possible in order to pack the most pixels into the shot and create the largest, sharpest, most detailed panoramic national park wall art possible.
In order to stitch panoramic shots together there are a large number of software programs that may be used to do so. After looking at many of them I settled on a free program called Hugin. When shooting panoramic shots to stitch together, it can help to find the nodal point and setup your gear with it in mind to make stitching panos easier. That seemed to be much more important when shooting subjects that were really close. Rather than trying to calculate the nodal point for the lenses I used (most often a fixed 50mm and the 70-200mm), I just experimented while shooting and got close enough that Hugin could work with the files and stitch them all together. Every once in a while Hugin would choke and not be able to stitch something but that was pretty rare. For shooting large distant landscapes, it seems like it is less important to precisely identify the nodal point for a particular lens.
Why would you want to go through all the trouble to get a pano head and spend all the time required to stitch a bunch of shots together? There are a couple reasons:
- You have a camera with a small to medium size sensor that can only realistically print a 40×60 inch print and you want to print something larger.
- You want a 60 inch wide print that you can get by cropping a single shot but want a sharper better quality photo and want to minimize the effects of lens distortion.
- You want a really large file of a large scene that you can crop any way you want and still create a large print from it.
Naturally, hauling around a sold metal Nodal Ninja tripod head, a large carbon fiber tripod, Canon DSLR, several lenses including a 70-200mm along with water and other hiking gear makes for some strenuous hiking out in the western US but it made it possible to create some awesome panoramic national park wall art from Grand Teton National Park, The Canadian Rockies, Glacier National Park and endless other scenic locations around the US and Canada.
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