Panoramic equipment help???

I want to take my photography to another level by learning how to properly merge shots for panoramics. I started looking at equipment online but I feel like I’m in over my head trying to figure out what to buy. I have a good Manfrotto tripod but I know I need a new ball head. It looks like I’ll also need a rotating pano plate (not sure what it’s called), a nodal slider (?), an L bracket (?). I have no clue what brand to go with or what items I’ll actually need. I shoot with a canon 5D IV and typically use a 16-35 or 70-200 (presuming for panos is mainly stick with the 16-35). Can somebody please point me in the right direction on this?

Houston wrote to me privately, I’ll share my response here. Be gentle with my highly biased opinions! I myself am typically thinking “what is my learning path” from simple to more complex, rather than “what gear should I buy to get started”.

I’ve been thinking about doing a video showing how to do single-row panoramas, which is what most people are setting up for.

That could some day be followed by a multi-row/spherical tutorial... but that’s much more complex, with complex gear and software to support it!

Approaching single row panos should probably start with a sense of what kind of images you’d like to tackle first. For many people that is landscapes. You?

Spinning the lens on the nodal point, more accurately the no-parallax-point (NPP) is needed for subjects that include close, mid and far. Totally unnecessary for most landscape work. It’s when you get to the mid and closer subjects that avoiding parallax errors becomes important.

So, here’s a broad-strokes outline for learning:
1. Shoot some landscapes with a slightly wide to slightly telephoto lens, say, EFL of 35 to 70mm, with plenty of overlap between adjacent shots. This can be done handheld! It should be done on manual exposure, WB, and focus settings, like most panorama work. Try some portrait and some landscape panos. Try some wider, try some more telephoto. Shoot perhaps 6 shots per pano as a starting point, and be sure to overlap 30 to 50%.

2. Find a youtube tutorial or maybe the Adobe tut on the automatic stitching that can be done in Photoshop, and try stitching a few panos.

3. As you get some experience with this, you can refine your technique, solve some problems, and get some great results.

4. Then, if still exploring, and wanting to solve for mid and closer subjects, is when you would need to look at:
a. A tripod you can level. Try it the hard way, it can be leveled just with the legs. Then consider a leveler.
b. Some head - this could be your leveler!
c. A rotator on top of the head. Ideally.
d. A nodal slide.

My single row setup is the Acratech GP head in pano mode - sort of upside down, the ball levels the rig, the pan rotator rides on top, and an inexpensive Desmond nodal rail. But I shoot plenty of hand-held as well.

5. You’ll then need to figure out the settings for finding the NPP for each lens you use, or if zoom lenses, perhaps for a few focal lengths. With live-view this is easier than it sounds, but more than I can write here. By “settings”, I mean where is the NPP and what mark on the nodal slide do you use? (Mostly they are calibrated in millimeters)

6. At that point, you’re ready to shoot and go back to photoshop with the same methods, except that you’re pretty safe at 25-30% overlap when you’re dialed in with spinning around the NPP.

Note that I’m running 3 different pano rigs (the single row described above, a Nodal Ninja 5, and a Gigapan Epic Pro) and 3 dedicated 360 spherical cameras (GoPro Fusion, GoPro Max, and insta360 Pro 2). That’s over about 15 years of exploration, professional pano work, and now teaching college 360 filmmaking classes. With all that gear available, I really love doing hand-held landscape panos on a DSLR for stitching in Photoshop!