Approaching the Scene 028: Advanced Panoramas Finding the "Nodal Point"

[Music] well hey everybody it's Hudson I've got all my photo bags kind of exploded out here and I'm doing that last minute crunch figuring out what's gonna make it what's not gonna make it into my bags for a trip I'm flying out to tomorrow when this video launches I'll be on a plane with the family kite boarding gear camera gear down to Baja and I'll try to bring you guys along and future approaching the scenes but but this week I'm gonna just run a video that I did in my advanced panorama training course on finding the no parallax point that video has been available as a free download in my store but I just want to throw it up here and I'll put a link to the course down below it's gonna help you find that point a lot of people call it the nodal point not necessarily quite accurate but the no parallax point where if you get your lens back over the axis of rotation it'll eliminate parallax where the objects close and distance are appear to be moving in relation to each other it's gonna help you align more advanced panoramic captures a little bit better once that's over I'll jump back in I'll take a few of your questions I had some really great questions over the last week come up on the YouTube feed I'll talk just a little bit more about my trip and some other upcoming trips I got a really exciting one to Cuba coming up pretty soon too so stay tuned [Music] alright so in this lesson we're gonna do one of the most important things you have to do before capturing advanced panoramas we're gonna find that magic place that we need to set the lens over the axis of rotation in your tripod in order to get rid of parallax to get rid of that that that appearance of close objects moving in relation to distance objects in the background and before I jump into a really simple technique for doing that and the tools that you're going to need to be able to accomplish it I want to talk just a minute about terminology because it gets really confusing I'm gonna call it the no parallax point and that's a pretty frequently modernly referred to method of calling this thing that we're looking for the no parallax point describes it perfectly it's that point that we set the lens over the tripod where it gets rid of parallax you're gonna hear a lot of people refer to it as the nodal point that's not necessarily perfectly accurate it's actually finding the entrance pupil of your lens and if you want to delve into depth about that stuff you can look it up online there's a lot of discussion doesn't really matter at all for our purposes I'm gonna call it the no parallax point the entrance pupil nodal points not technically correct but again this really doesn't matter it's that point that gets rid of parallax and our scene that appearance of closed objects moving in relation to distant objects we don't need very much to accomplish this except a couple of things we need a good steady tripod that you can get nice and level on a panning clamp and I'm gonna give you guys links to the tools that I use in this this course this one's by really right stuff there are there are some ones made by more affordable manufacturers they're really right stuff when is my favorite particularly with this little quick clamp we're gonna need what's generally referred to as a nodal slider because for years most people refer to this as the nodal point until the engineers kind of corrected it as entrance people and then we've gone to then no parallax point so they generally still call these nodal sliders this is a Kirk one that I really really love because I can switch its orientation the clamp on the rail I'll show you how all this stuff works in a second so really stable tripod and whether you're using a ball head or you're like meeting you like using a fluid head you know generally most of us in the photography game at this level where you wanted to do advanced Panos still photographers tend to use these ARCA Swiss compatible clamps so whether it's on the top of your ball head whether it's on the top of your fluid head my suggestion is that you clamp one of these painting clamps into that clamp that you normally clamp your camera into and that's gonna let us get this thing perfectly level here with my fluid head I've got a bubble level right here I've already leveled it I'm gonna look at the bubble level on top just to make sure that that level is perfectly level clamp it and now with everything locked down except this painting clamp I'm level as I rotate this clamp perfectly level the next thing I do is I take the nodal slider and I'm gonna open that clamp and put the nodal slider in it and you know for starters I'll put it just as if I was basically right on top of the tripod to show you what the parallax looks like and then you're simply gonna clamp your camera into that nodal rail the neat thing about the nodal rail is that if I open this clamp a bit I can slide forward and back and you see how I'm rotating the camera through it you know with the lens at different positions over the center of rotation so that's the whole trick that's what a nodal slider does for you it helps you find that no parallax point and the the position that you want to be in we're up here on this parking structure partially because we have all of these nice vertical lines out in the distance at what is definitely infinity from the camera the other thing you need is a vertical line that's close to the camera that you can observe as it moves in relation to those vertical lines in the background so here I've got just a light stand with a bit of pink gaff tape wrapped around the tip to make it just sign of stand out from the buildings as I Pan the camera and you can use anything you use a fence post you can use a post on the porch of your house and then a building in the distance there's almost anything that's vertical that has a definitely stands out has some contrast from the background is going to work for these purposes my general trick is a light stand with some pink tape on it and I go someplace where I've got vertical lines in the distance this parking structure is perfect for it so the great thing about our modern digital cameras whether you're using mirrorless or whether you're using a DSLR is that we've got the live view on the backs and you can even zoom in to it so if I activate this live view in the back of my camera and I know a lot of you were saying he's got his camera horizontal generally Hudson talks about putting the camera vertical to capture most panoramic captures well I agree with that except for this purpose we're having the aspect ratio wide just gives you a little bit more room to see that line as it's moving on the live view so for those of you like me with slightly older eyes I'm certain have a little problem focusing at close distances I'm gonna get my reading glasses on so right now without even moving my live view I can see that that light stand that's close to me is moving in relation to the background you know and you're gonna want to be focused on that close vertical object that you're using to measure that movement that parallax movement it depends sort of how distant you want to be from it whether you're using a wide-angle or a longer lens think about what you might set in a panoramic capture you know with a wide-angle lens you're gonna have things really close to you and things distant from you all in focus at the same time so you want to have that pretty close and wide-angle lenses are gonna be even the most important to get this parallax point correctly the no parallax point because there's so much distortion it matters a little bit more with a wide-angle than with a normal or a longer lens so right now as I said I can see that it's moving in relation to the background without even zooming in on my live view so I mean it's gonna slide I'm keeping my my my clamp open a little bit and slide that noddle slider back a little bit that movements getting a little bit better I slide it back a little bit more that movements getting a little bit less and I can zoom in just one level I don't want to zoom all the way because if i zoom all the way I'm not going to see and the light stand-in enough of the frame I still want to have a kind of a wide field of view but I want to be able to see whether it's moving in relation to the background and I'm just manually sliding the camera back ooh there's a lot less motion now a little bit more less yet a little bit more Wow almost no motion I'm gonna slide in a little bit more and at this point I can zoom in another level because there's less motion and it's gonna amplify it a little bit and you're just gonna get to the point where there's no motion as you move through the frame right now that looks good to me and I'm just gonna lock that panning clamp turn it around and have a look at what my marking here is on this and to me I see that it's at 80 millimeters on this particular noddle slider so I'll get out my phone and I'll take a note that for this particular lens which is a prime twenty millimeter Nikon F 1.8 lens that 80 millimeters on my nodal slider is the correct no parallax point and I keep a little on my phone drop box document it's a PDF file that's available for offline access on Dropbox that's my method with all of my lenses and their parallax points listed I don't have every single one memorized you know I think it's important to know that if I was gonna do a longer lens if I was gonna do say a hundred and five millimeter lens I would have that that light stand you know 30 40 even a hundred feet away from me because it's very unlikely that I'm gonna do a long lens panorama that has a closed object like that everything would just be completely out of focus and it wouldn't matter whether there was parallax or not so because the longer lens tends to have less depth of field you're gonna have objects that might be closer than infinity that are that are actually quite a ways away from you let's say fifty to a hundred feet away from you so you're gonna be a different distance from this light stand to check this with a longer lens with the wide angle lens nice up close like this you'll just have to shift it around to get where you're seeing the motion that you want and think about with the particular lens that you're using how close would you have an object the camera I think the last big point is that if you're doing this with zoom lenses each and every focal length is gonna have a different parallax point on almost all zoom lenses there's a few exceptions I've found where it stays pretty consistent but the elements are moving around inside the lens and that generally causes the entrance pupil of the lens to be shifting with that zoom so my technique for that is you know let's say you have Nikon's 14 to 24 millimeter lens it has markings at 14 millimeters 16 millimeters at 18 millimeters and at 24 millimeters I'll just measure it at each of those points and I make sure if I'm gonna do panoramas you know I figure out the composition that I want and let's say it's at 18 millimeters I'll consult what that 18 millimeter no parallax point is on my document so for a pro a prime lens like this you find the parallax point and you're done for a zoom lens you're gonna want to set it at specific set points that you can go back to which are usually marked on the barrel of your lens and check and note the new parallax point for each one of those focal links as possible that's essentially the entire process it's not hard to do wherever you are you know I've used a fence post and a distant building in Patagonia when I lost access to my phone my phone battery was dead and I needed to check quick before doing an important panorama I mean there's there's always the possibility of just using any two vertical objects where you can change how close you are to the closed one and have one out there at infinity to find the parallax point and you know we'll talk more about different equipment that we're gonna use for advanced panoramas for multiple rows and for angling the camera up and down and still keeping that rotation level in the next video we're going to talk about sort of the tripod setup for advanced panoramas but this is what I would use to check and find your nodal point camera horizontal on just a simple nodal slider with a panning clamp and I'll put links to that equipment once again out there for you guys alright cool so I hope that helped some of you that have been struggling a little bit with getting panorama with closed subjects in different distance objects to line up properly it's a real simple process finding that nodal point calibrating your lenses in my advanced piano training course I go over that I go over some tips and tricks for capturing more advanced pianos and HDR Panos multirow Panos panels where you having to look down on a subject to go over a bunch of gear that can actually save you money over buying you know dedicated pano capture kits I've got some lighter weight cheaper equipment that does a fantastic job panoramas have been a a passion of mine for a really long time so I hope you'll check out the course it's down below linked in the YouTube description and so again you know one thing that approaching the scene for me I really want this video series it's every Thursday for those of you that haven't been watching I really want it to be a conversation I want you guys to join in ask questions last week I did a video about calibrating your monitor to get better quality prints to avoid those dark kind of muddy looking prints and I had a lot of really great questions coming in as a response and I want to take just a couple of those right now so David Arthur asked me please address the management of the ambient light in the room when doing Hardware calibration because I have windows in my room I want to calibrate in the evening which is when I'm more likely to do editing I also hang a black curtain in the doorway to keep the glare off the monitor screen which is opposite the doorway your thoughts are appreciated so you know I have a long way I work in a studio here where I've really controlled lighting I've got curtains and blackout screens over all the windows that I can shut down there's no direct sunlight coming in on my monitor we have real controlled studio lighting conditions in here I work with a couple other people too and so it's you know I calibrate for the same conditions I have in here all the time but that hasn't always been the case you know before I built this studio on my property here in Portland I have a big old farmhouse that that's just across the yard from me here and up on the third floor I had kind of a back bedroom and I hung a blackout curtain over the window in there painted the walls all gray and I would just dim the lights when I worked on my photos and I did a lot of printing in there I have my hewlett-packard C 3200 that was my first larger format 24-inch rohlfeam printer it was up in that room and you know I so I just I just kind of created a dungeon for myself in a back room with the window covered you know I don't I don't have the need for that in here because I can just easily open and close the windows and I've got good studio lighting I don't worry about calibrating for ambient lighting the i1 display Pro has a mode where you can leave it plugged in connect it to your computer with a little cover over the the photo spectrometer there's a kind of a locking little cover that keeps it protected but it reads ambient light through it and that you know it can actually keep the monitor up and down for the for the light that it's reading in the room I'm gonna highly highly recommend that you set up a little bit of a dungeon system for your editing I know it's not the greatest but I think the worst situations you can have or where your monitor screen is facing a window that lights coming in and creating glare on your monitor and just changing the brightness of your moderates gonna be really hard for you to see how bright shadows and highlights really are in that condition another really bad situations when your monitor screen is up in front of a big window you know I know it's lovely to sit at your desk and look out the window but if you've got strong backlight coming in over the top of the monitor it's gonna really mess up the way that your eyes are seeing the screen probably one of the best situations I ever had editing was back when I was working as an attorney I had another house not far from here in Portland and that one I set up the basement as a photo editing studio and it literally had this one little basement level window that no light came in and I again painted that room gray and it literally got almost no light that I couldn't control in there so I think that that just strategically locating your editing monitor even if you're on a laptop when I'm in a hotel I closed the curtains when I'm editing I don't really ever edit on the airplane unless everyone's asleep and all the blinds are down so it's just you know those those thoughts about not having glare on the screen not having a lot of backlight and that's that's all I really worry about for monitoring I had another great question Julie Boyle said have a great trip Hudson I announced that I was gonna take off for Baja last week and she said take us you know do some videos on the vacation if you possibly can and love to what you're up to well I intend you know this this is a big project whenever I go on a trip and I'm taking photography gear it's a project but when I take the family and when I'm going kite boarding you know it's like almost like you know I was in the military before I was in college before I was a lawyer I was in the original Gulf War and you know it literally reminds me of sort of a coordinated assault like it takes so much planning we're taking kites we're taking you know stuff for the kids we're taking photographic equipment and everything that we need for nine days because we're really sort of staying self contained in a house on a beach a ways away from any stores or anything so it's a it's a heavy lift and I'll take you along because it's actually quite a project and I rely heavily on my wife and on my kiteboarding friends on a trip like this to get us there with all the gear and get settled so it's gonna be a fun time we'll see what happens but I'll definitely be doing some some recording along the way so look forward to that I had another another person Bruce asked what are your next trips what are you looking forward to well so obviously when you watch this video you know if you watch it soon after its launch I'm gonna be in Baja for the next nine days sorry for everyone in the polar vortex I I do feel a lot of sympathy that's that's looks ridiculously cold but I'm gonna be down in sunny SIA Cortes and when I get back I've got about a month here well part most of a month and then I Drive the big sprinter on El Jefe down to Death Valley I have just a few spots left and that workshop if anybody wants to join up with the government reopened I know that all of the restrooms are gonna be pumped and the trash is going to be cleaned up the park was never closed so that workshop has been a go non-stop but it's gonna be a lot more comfortable even if they closed the government a week before it gets there things should be relatively clean and you know the hotel is still operating and the park is open so that's going to be a fun trip then I have South Carolina coming at the end of March and that's going to be a fantastic workshop we hold that in Old Town Charleston but we do a ton a birds and wildlife work in this old cypress knees swamp that has mile a boardwalk that the Audubon Society owned owns with just tons of birdlife and we go to the South Carolina Raptor rehabilitation center and they fly Birds for us and let us photograph all these amazing owls and Raptors close up and we go around the old town and we go to some old plantation gardens and photograph fountains and knights street scenes and eat amazing Charleston food and generally have a great time geeking out on all things photographic from birds and wildlife to to travel photography and then I'm gonna meet up with my family in Cuba because I'm really strongly considering a 2020 photo workshop to Cuba and so I don't ever like to run a workshop where I haven't been and I'm gonna go I've got some friends and family that run travel to Cuba so I'm gonna go down there kind of coordinate what would be great to photograph check it out and then look forward to a potential 2020 Cuba workshop so that's sort of the beginning of my season and then I'm gonna be doing Cannon Beach northern Oregon coast spectacular workshop I can't even remember I think that's in late April so stay tuned look through the the workshop there's links to all that stuff in the youtube description but I've got a lot of fun travel coming up and I look forward to bringing everyone along so thanks so much again I'm Hudson Henry if you've watched it to this point hopefully you liked it enough to click like and click Subscribe and share it with your friends and I'll see you next week you

Channel: Hudson Henry Photography

Views: 20,658

Rating: 4.8992591 out of 5

Keywords: Death Valley, Charleston, calibration, measuring, entrance pupil, no parallax point, digital photography, education, Photography Class, Hudson Henry Photography, how to, photo training, tutorial, lesson, panorama, panoramic, nodal point, Cannon Beach, approaching the scene advanced panoramas finding nodal point

Id: PaU5takz-K4

Length: 20min 50sec (1250 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2019