Hello and welcome to the website for my panorama bracket,if you by my kit you will be able to take first class panoramas and perfectly joined QVTR movies and you need not buy anything else.

I make these in my own workshop out of Brass,Stainless Steel and Aluminium I anodise my self,each one is individualy made so if you are looking for injection moulded plastics and cosmetic pefection you will not find it here.On the other hand if you want seemless QVTR movies(which are really 360 deg panos) and perfectly straight panoramas you will find the kit I use to do this.

Follow the setup instructions ( I will try to cover every detail) and you will be able to set up the kit and take your panorama in less than 5 minutes,you dont even need to look through the view finder before you take each image.

On the next pages you will find detailed setup instructions and some theory,but if you are not interested in the mechanics of whats going on just follow the setup instructions and the examples and ignore the theory you don't need to know it to take first rate panoramas.

Setup

Now comes the issue of setup, there is really only one issue with taking panoramas and that is to rotate the camera around the right point. The correct term for this point is the entrance pupil (often wrongly called the nodal point) If you look into the front of a stopped down lens you can see the entrance pupil, it’s the bright spot in the middle of the lens. To take a perfect panorama and especially a QVTR movie you need your camera to rotate around this point.

Light only travels in straight lines and the image that hits the camera CCD is upside down,the point we want to rotate the camera around is the point where the light rays cross.This is called the entrance pupil. Incidentally the exact same thing happens with our eyes,the image hits the retiner upside down and the brain flips it the right way up. Here is a little excercise to demonstrate.

Page still under construction 

 Get yourself a piece of paper and make a very small hole in the centre,bring it up to your eye and look through the hole. What ever. you look at through the hole you will see that some of the objects are above the hole some are right in front  and some are below the hole.As we know light only travels in straight lines the rays of light you see from above the hole must be traveling at a downward angle and the rays from below the hole must be traveling at an upward angle.The point at which the light crosses over within the lens is the point we want to rotate the camera around.

 Assemble the bracket as in A1. Then fit you camera as in A2  and level the table

Step1,   The first step is to set the horizontal L shaped rail of the bracket to the centre of the lens plane, I use  a plumb line suspended from a map pin in the ceiling as in  photo A3. Position the tripod so as the plumb line passes through the pivot screw on the table. then slide the L bracket left or right until the plumb line passes through the centre of the lens cap making sure the bracket is square to the line. (there is a plan on the accessories page for an easy to make centre finder that can be used to find the centre of anything round)

 Your setup should look exactly like picture A2,If all is well mark the point on the bracket where the plumb line passes through the pivot bolt and if you do not change your camera you  will never have to do this again.