next level stuff this...

I love shooting panoramas with my camera.  I like the results - a super-high resolution image with tons of detail meaning you can zoom in on it and almost be there.  It's something you can't achieve with a wide-angle lens.

But I really enjoy the technical aspect of the whole exercise.  I've published a "how-to" guide here on my blog (there's a link on the front page) and meticulously follow all the steps to ensure I capture the best, most easily switchable images that I can.

No matter how carefully I level my tripod and camera though, there are always blank, wasted pixels in the final stitched image due to what is known as parallax - it's the effect you get when you raise your thumb in front of your face and while looking at it through one eye and then the other it appears to move.

To counter this, I bought a cheap nodal rail to sit on top of my tripod head.  What this allows you to do is shift the pivot point for your camera from the plane of the sensor to the aperture blade in your lens - the place where light converges.  Then, as you pan across your scene, the effects of parallax are reduced or removed altogether.

To prove this to myself, I set out to the Baran Mountain above my home and shot two panoramas - ne with and one without the nodal rail.

I've posted both the stitched but unprocessed images below:

no rail fitted

nodal rail fitted - note fewer blank pixels

And finally, here is the processed version of the "nodal rail" image above:

Fujifilm GFX50R, Fujinon 100-200 f5.6 @ 100mm
1/27th of a second at f16, ISO 100
tripod, nodal rail attachment, self-timer release
8 images stitched in Adobe Lightroom

As is commonplace these days, watch the video below to see how I went about setting the nodal point for my lens and then hear about an interesting tale from the creepy chapel graveyard!