MICRO MASTER CLASS
ALL PICTURES © JO PLUMRIDGE
EQUIPMENT
Camera
You can use any DSLR or mirrorless cam-era, but you really do need to be able to change your lens in order to get the most out of a vertorama. This is because you’ ll need a wide-angle lens with a shorter fo-cal length than is usually available on fixed lens cameras.
Lens
To cappre vertoramas, you’ ll need an ultra wide-angle lens with a wide angle of view, so that you can capture as much of your scene of possible. Do bear in mind that if you use a crop frame( APS-C) camera you will need a lens that accounts for the crop factor. Specific lenses designed for APS-C cameras that
start at around 10 / 11 mm are ideal.
Also bear in mind that the lens you use needs to be rectilinear as opposed to fisheye. A rectilinear lens has little or no barrel distor-tion, meaning that the straight lines in your scene will be almost straight in your image.
Tripod You will need a sturdy tripod for this sort of work, as you’ ll be using it as a base for panning shots to create your vertorama. Manfrotto and Gitzo both make sturdy and reliable tripods, for example. In addition, the tripod’ s head needs to allow you to swing the part that attaches to the camera( a ballhead is ideal). Attachments To get accurate vertoramas, you really need to invest in a nodal point adapter.
Attachments
To get accurate vertoramas, you really need to invest in a nodal point adapter.
This is device that screws on to the top of your tripod and helps to match up the overlapping sections of your vertorama. It does this by allowing you to rotate your camera and lens around the nodal point of your lens— thus avoiding parallax errors.
In plain English, this essentially means that you’ re lining up all the angles in your shots correctly so that you can achieve perfect stitching in postproduction. In addition, you will need a panning clamp, to allow you to rotate smoothly and a L-Bracket to attach your camera to this set-up. Alternatively, you could invest in a nodal point tripod head— i. e. one that’ s set up to allow you to rotate smoothly and with the correct angles taken into accord.
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