In a very real sense focus stacking and especially stacked tiered
panos are an exercise in patience, so if you don’t need to develop
patience, you probably won’t like this type of photography.
[Note: The above photo is what we could agree is a panorama but
what I call a partial panorama because it approximates the size of a
standard photo but has (somehow) a sense of greater
spaciousness. This was taken with the Nikon D3x and the Nikon
24mm PC-E lens using the shift-lens feature. Of course this is a
sad size to view it at. The original is very large and the fine detail of
any part is quite visible. In the macro- panoramas on the next
pages this idea is applied to a much smaller view.]
Single and Multi-row Panos
There is a big difference between single and multi-row panoramas
both as to equipment and approach. With single-row panos I can
almost get away without having a panoramic head. That is how
good the stitching software like PTgui is. And I don’t really have to
worry about the so-called nodal point for the lens I am using. I can
take three, four, five... whatever number of shots in a horizontal
direction, left to right, and the stitching software just handles. And I
can stack each photo.
However even with these single-row panoramas it is better to have
both a pano head and a correctly adjusted nodal point slide.
However, the moment I want to have two or more horizontal rows
on top of one another (two tiers), it is a different story. At that point I
not only need a panoramic head but a very special one at that, one
that can manage more than one row at a time. And for multi-row
panos I need to find the exact (or near to it) nodal point for the lens
I am using. The “nodal point” refers to the adjusting of your lens for
parallax so that as you turn it sideways or up and down on the
tripod, the point of view does not shift.
I won’t try to explain it in too much detail here, but you can see it for
yourself by just holding a finger up before your eyes, looking at your
finger, and closing one eye at a time. Look how your finger moves
against whatever is in the background. That is the idea of parallax.
In order for the finger and the background not to move we would
have to bring our two eyes to the same point and have but a single
view.