Panoramic Photography with the Neewer Leveling Base

well hi and uh thanks for tuning in it's been a while since i posted anything on youtube something to do with a lockdown and a pandemic or something we're going to talk about another kind of pan and that's a that's panoramic photography today and how a leveler can help your panoramic photography be more efficient so you're probably watching this video because you're either doing panoramic photography and you're interested in how you can improve it and or you are interested in panoramic photography but don't know what it's about so i'll just give a quick definition panoramic photography is where you're trying to create a wide-angle image when we we take a shot with a single lens we only get so much wide angle view so by actually putting the camera on the tripod and taking a succession of of shots by by panning the the head and overlapping those shots by about 25 then stitching them together in something like lightroom or photoshop you'll end up with an image that has a much wider view or a vista than just taking a single shot alone but before you even think about leveling the tripod there's some settings on your camera that that you should look after before starting a panoramic shoot and one of those things is to set your camera to manual exposure because the last thing you want is for automatic exposure or semi-automatic exposure like aperture priority shutter priority trying to adjust the exposure as you pan the light might change across the scene and you don't really want it to adjusting each um each of those shots those overlapping shots uh to have equal exposure because then it won't look natural the other thing you should do also is put the camera into manual white balance again same thing as you pan across the scene the camera could interpret the color balance in that scene differently and then in post-production you're ending up having to mess around with all those shots before you stitch them together to make sure that they're matched in in their look and of course the other thing is manual focus focus may change if you're using autofocus when you pan across because it might pick up a different part in each scene that's a different distance from the camera and so it's going to throw the background out of focus or the foreground out of focus or whatever one other thing that you're advised not to use in a panoramic chute is a polarizer because a polarizer works best has the greatest effect i should say when it's at 90 degrees to the bearing of the sun so if you're shooting 90 degrees away from the sun you'll get the darkest skies the greatest contrast and so on but as you pan that effect is going to change and it's going to look a little weird in your panoramic because you'll have dark sky over here and light sky over here so avoid using a polarizer so of course the other thing i mentioned at the beginning was to ensure that the tripod legs are level when i say legs are level i mean the base of the tripod and not the head itself because if you get the use the bubble level on the head and you don't make sure that the tripod is perfectly level or the column on the tripod is that perfectly vertical in all directions then you're going to get you're going to have a little problem with your panoramic and the reason for that is that um while the the head may look balanced at or level i should say at one angle as you turn it if the legs are not perfectly level then you're going to find that the horizon is going to start to tilt the more you pan around so when you go to stitch those together in software what the software is looking for are equivalent parts of each scene that can stitch those together and eventually create a hopefully a straight horizon but in doing so all those individual pictures are going to be kind of aligned like this rather than this and that means you're going to have to crop off a part of the image and you might want to include you know clouds in the sky or something in the foreground so cropping is is not is something you want to avoid if possible so you might be tempted to just sort of eyeball the column of the uh of the tripod just to make sure that the the legs are are actually level and that doesn't always work well you can be out by a little bit if you're just you know going around the thing and making sure it looks vertical from every angle that's not going to assure you perfect results and that's the reason why we're talking about this guy today this is the leveler and i'm going to show you how to use it so if you extend the column on your tripod you'll see probably three screws or allen head screws or something like that just back those off and then you can simply unthread the head that's on your currently on your tripod so that you can put the leveler on there let's uh have a look and so there's a standard 3 8 stud that you should find there and that's where the leveler will get mounted so this is the neewer dle vx vx68 leveler you can see that it comes with that standard 3 8 thread on the bottom so you just put it right on the the 3 8 stud on your column and similarly on the top here this is where you would now mount the head that you just removed from the tripod and there's a there is a bolt underneath here to assist you with with tightening that down so it also comes with this nifty little case although i can't see myself using the case very much because um this is fairly low profile and i'll just leave it on the tripod head it's um the tripod rather it's better than you know removing it putting the head back on blah blah blah it's uh but it's a nicely nicely made unit it really is it's um all metal and everything even when you we turn the adjusters on it it feels nice and smooth so again it's a 3 8 thread on the bottom here and 3 8 stud on top of your tripod column simply put it on spin it around tighten it and then flip the tripod over and tighten those three screws on the bottom so let's say i intentionally imbalance the tripod where i know the column is not going to be perfectly vertical so i'll just adjust this one leg down a little bit so with that tripod leg a little shorter than the other two it's now created a bit of an imbalance in the the tripod itself or the head itself so i've adjusted the head with the controls to get the bubble level on the uh the arka swiss adapter here right in the center in this position but watch what happens when i rotate it you notice the bubble is now off to the side here that's because it's kind of leaning toward that leg or away from that leg that is um is now made shorter than the other two so if you're taking a panoramic and you you pan around um with the tripod in that condition you'll get the horizon shifting rather dramatically now this may be a bit of an extreme case but it hopefully demonstrates why it's important to get the base of your tripod not the head itself but the base of the tripod level so once you've mounted the the leveler on your column you can then attach and tighten the screws on the bottom by the way just to make sure that's secure you can then just simply thread your existing head onto a leveler and make sure it's tight by hand unfortunately they don't supply any screws underneath for fastening the head down to the leveler securely so it depends on how tightly you you wind it on here we have the head uh on the leveler and you can see from the the bubble level that's that's on the one of the three bubble levels i'll show you the other two in a minute uh that's on the leveler itself it shows the bubble is way off here so what i'll do is i'll start around the back and start adjusting that leveler and you can see the the head is actually moving as i do that and the bubble is coming closer to the center so it looks like i have to adjust the ones on the side here and sure enough the bubble is coming toward the middle and then do a little bit more adjustment on the back to get that better centered and one of these two needs adjustment and that that's looking pretty good right there so what you would do then is you would just lock those settings down with these two thumb screws and i think they have to be tightened against the the body of the level its leveler itself as you can see there's a bubble level on the one side which is looking fairly level now and there's also a bubble level on this side so you've got three bubble levels each about 60 degrees apart from the other so that's one way of assuring that you've got a perfect level so now i've leveled the head so that the bubble is in the center on the arca-swiss adapter here or swiss mount and just to show you let's take it for a ride we'll pan around and you notice the bubble is staying nicely in the center because we now have essentially the base of the tripod perfectly level and therefore the column is perfectly vertical so it's a bit fiddly to set things up but if you're taking an important panoramic this is definitely worth a minute or two to get these set up properly so i hope that's helped you understand what the purpose of the leveler is and how to improve your panoramic photography through the use of a leveler and if you enjoyed this content found it useful i'd appreciate a thumbs up and maybe even subscribe to the channel and thanks for watching you

Channel: Photo Topics

Views: 5,850

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Id: TzttUhcv91E

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021