I’ve always wanted a panoramic tripod head to do real estate photography. A stitched panorama will have much less lens distortion than a single image shot with a very wide-angle lens.
High-quality panoramic heads are priced from about $400 to $900 and they have many features. But I only need to occasionally shoot a horizontal row of photos which can be stitched together.
Before buying an expensive panoramic head, I bought a 240mm nodal rail with a sliding camera mount for $35. There are shorter rails but a longer nodal rail can work with a wider range of lenses.
It turned out that this cheap, little attachment works perfectly for what I wanted to do. Did I mention it was cheap?
Setting up a nodal rail
Setting up a nodal rail is easier and faster than a full panoramic tripod head. Mount the nodal rail to any Arca-Swiss compatible tripod head. Attach your camera and lens to the nodal rail. It’s important that the camera is level and that it stays level when rotated on the tripod.
I usually use two small light stands to find the entrance pupil, (aka. the front nodal point), of a particular camera-lens combination. One stand is placed about 1.5m from the camera and the other is lined up about 5m away. The exact distances are not important. If you don’t have two lights stands handy, you can use any two vertical objects, one near and one further away, that are in a perpendicular line away from your camera.
As the camera is rotated left and right, the two light stands or two vertical objects should stay lined up with each other when viewed through the camera’s live view. If they don’t stay lined up because of parallax error, slide the nodal rail and/or camera mount back and forth until they do stay lined up. This should take only a couple minutes.
My camera is attached to an L-bracket and vertically clamped into the nodal rail. This gives the maximum vertical angle of view which is important for single-row panoramas.
A nodal rail can also be used for vertical panoramas: rotate the tripod head to its vertical orientation and horizontally clamp the camera into the nodal rail.
I’m very happy I didn’t buy an expensive panoramic tripod head. A simple nodal rail is a quick, easy and inexpensive way to do single-row panoramas.
