Horizontal pole panos

[mathrafal]

G'day all.

I have to produce a pano from the top of a church tower, a daunting task, since heights bother me and I am somewhat worried about dangling my equipment through a belfry door.

I suppose this means using a horizontal rig with my poles. However, I don't have the correct pano head for this one, I think, since it's a 360Precision, which means the head - which cannot be locked off - is offset by 8mm.

I have had a look at the Ultimate series, but am not sure if this is the right choice, since it will not allow me the -10 degree tilt that I would want to cover the nadir, or the +60 degrees for the zenith.

I have no idea what I am actually planning here, so any advice on equipment would be gratefully received. If you could also pay attention to the following, however, it would make things even clearer for me. So:

What would be the right choice of head, if I were planning on taking the panorama using a conventional technique, albeit pitched through 90 degrees?

And

If I am using the conventional technique, how the hell do I add a nadir shot?

Or

Would I be better off mounting my Roundshot at a 90 degree angle to the pole and taking the shots that way, manually patching the footprint and adding an offset 'back' shot using the viewpoint technique?

Unless I am missing something, such as the basic premis that the normal technique will be acceptable in this instance, but there seems to be a lack of concrete information on this on the net, and I really don't want to spend hours redoing and experimenting with the shot, given my general fear of heighs and, worse, falling!

Thanks in advance...

Jon

[Ulrichmetz]

Hi Jon,

i´m not sure if this is it, what you mean :
http://www.tagblatt.de/Home/bilder/bild ... ,4643.html

and this is the same technique (just the starting pano from the bridge):
http://www.tagblatt.de/Home/bilder/bild ... ,4700.html

They both are made with a horizontal pole ( not too long, ca. 1,50 m) pressed on the balustrade (church-pano) or ground (bridge-pano) and a Nodal Ninja R1 (tilt 7.5 degrees back, 1.85 cm offset) 4 shots with Sigma 10mm (shaved ) on a 5D MKII, wireless shutter release.

The " nodal shot" was made from a slightly diffrent point of view backwards and the rest was fixed in Photoshop.

Hope it takes you closer to success,

Ulrich

[mathrafal]

Many thanks Ulrich, that is exactly what I am posting about. How exactly was the reverse shot taken with an R1? You mention that it was pointing backwards, but I cannot visualize that . . .

Jon

[kbellis]

Cool work Ulrich! Love the pigeons!!! ... How'd they come into frame? - luck or Photoshop?

Here's a stupid attempt I tried earlier this spring just as a test / experiment with the sideways idea - http://panocea.us/7499/ - my wife thought I had lost it!

Kelly

[Ulrichmetz]

Hi Jon, hi Kelly,

thanks for your comments.

One picture tells more than all my words in poor english. I attached the original shots here, so you can see how i shot these pictures.
Feel free to download them and use for your own practice

Result :

Final HDR-Pano

Pole2_hdri.p2vr.preview.jpg (69.09 KiB) Viewed 459 times

The pigeons were there, but photoshop helped a little, because they just appeared, when i finshed shooting.So i tried to get the same viewpoint again and photoshop did the rest.

Keep on spinning,

Ulrich