Nodal Point and Tripod Heads

[dandaluzphotography]

Hi Guys,

I'm tried to get a panoramic shot of NYC from Weehawken, NJ using 5 different images and stitching them together using CS5 and it didn't work out.

I've been reading some stuff about the nodal point and I understand the nodal point comes into effect for nearby objects, but does it matter if I am shooting a cityscape from some distance away?

Another question I have is about the tripod head I am using. I have a Manfrotto pistol grip. Jumping ahead a little bit, when I stitched the images together (it was 5 of them) I noticed the buildings were crooked and so was the shoreline. I tried using all the different options CS5 provides for this but all came out the same. When I examined each image individually, I noticed none of the pictures was particularly straight and that's probably why the buildings were crooked. I thought the stitching software would line these up but I guess that's not the case.

Anyway, my plan is to try this again, this time using a point of reference on the cityscape to keep the camera leveled through all five images. Do you guys think this would work? I don't have a panoramic head for the nodal point, but I might not need that based on how far I will be taking the pic from.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Danny

 

[Garbz]

Nodal point comes into effect when there is extreme foreground and background in the same image. Many times the stitching software can be worked around.

As for being level, not a requirement at all. You can take one photo upside if you want, and and mix landscape and portrait images too, it all depends on how your software handles it. Whiiiiiiiiiiich brings me to:

Photoshop sucks at this. My opinion only. Some people will rave about it, though I think out of all the software I have used it may be as easy to use as some of the best, but it has consistently given me the worst results. I try it again every time a new version of photoshop comes out and go back to what I was using.

Check out a program called AutoPano Pro to see what you're missing. Though if you have serious parallax error then even AutoPano Pro may not be able to render the image correctly.