AotPR part 7 - 'The Proof is in the Pudding'

'Ere, anybody wanna see some piccies?

The head works, the mobile phone connects to it and works as a remote control, the camera fires!

Since the last update I've done three full panoramas to test the head:

My bedroom/workroom.
On top of the 4.5m tripod out in the woods.
During a talk given to one of the local photo clubs.

You can see the results as flat images and as QTVR files in this gallery. I've left the tripod 'as-is' to show how large a tripod cap is needed. I was pleasantly surprised by how small it is, but shouldn't have been, given that the head was designed to have a small footprint in the final pano. You'll also see from the 'staggered' edges of the bottom pulley that the camera still isn't held in exactly the right place, it's about 5mm offset to one side.

Bedroom/workroom

The new mobile phone had turned up earlier that day, and while waiting for the video call to Patrick's meeting (at 5am!), it occurred to me that the panohead hadn't actually shot a panorama yet! A while later the phone had been paired via Bluetooth with the NXT control brick and off it went, triggered wirelessly.

Out in the woods

Now that I knew the head worked, and that the phone worked as a remote control, it was time to go and do a real-life test. So I loaded up the van with the big tripod, camera bag and well-wrapped motorised head and headed off up into the hill in the late afternoon/early evening. This is an area I've photographed several times, right next to the remains of an Iron Age fort. My WWP 'Best of 2005' entry was shot about 200 metres from here.

This panorama is a good example of why I built this head rather than pursue regular 'pole panos' - due to it being dusk, the shutter speed was 0.8s, even with the lens fairly wide at f6.3 and ISO640. This is on the lower end of what is possible with a regular pole pano - go any lower on the shutter speed or use a longer lens and it would definitely be out.

At this stage I still had a 'fixed' program with a 1s period for the shutter hard-wired into the movements, otherwise a longer shutter speed and lower ISO would have been used. This has since been solved and will be the subject of a future blog entry.

Exmouth Photo Group

I give a lot of talks to various local groups, using a combination of Keynote and CubicNavigator to present both still images and interactive panoramas. For the second half of this talk I decided to go out on a limb, and stitched a panorama in front of a live audience. You will see a couple of stitching errors, partly due to lack of checking before stitching, partly due to the sideways offset of the camera having a large impact in the confined space.

In the next article, I will go through some of the minor changes that have happened to the head (moving things around, different gear ratios) and some changes in the program so that it now flashes a message on the phone asking you to enter the length of pause for each shot, and then pauses for that period.

Ian