Tell Me About Pano Heads

I must be missing something. I don't see the point of a center shot. If you start at the left and turn to the right and take overlapping shots all the way, there is no missed shot. I can't imagine missing a shot.

I probably didn't explain it well
I PSCS3, you can only choose an image is centre: That image won't get transformed.
In Hugin or PTGUI you can choose any point in the image as centre.

Something like this sketch:

Naaa, I get nothing like that. You select the kind of pano you want and when you pick the images to go into it, that's all you get. Once you click to load them, it works till it's done.

i shot a pano of the historic hoboken lackawanna terminal back in the spring. The shots didn't really line up well in pse2's photomerge and i forget what other program i tried. I downloaded ptgui's trial and uploaded the pics. They merged all the pics together and it looked flawless. No problems getting the pics aligned. Pano came out great, minus the ptgui watermarks.

I just tried a Pano today of a river barge stopped beside the dock area in our riverside park here. It had to stop because of the fog. I tried a different kind of pano shoot, where I started at one end, then walked a ways and took another shot and so on. Sort of a walk beside pano, instead of stand in one spot and sweep the camera in an arc. Anyone ever tried that? Cause it didn't stitch worth a damn in CS3.

We do 360 panos in 12 shots with a wide angle lens in portrait orientation. There is significant overlap and we could probably do it in 8 but it makes the stitching easy. I don't know why you would need a lot more shots than that unless you were using a pretty long lens.

Our pano head is a nodal ninja. It is very well built and I'm very happy with it. There is a discount code you can use to get it for $180. It would be nice if you were able to set the camera back further. I think the new bigger one will do that but its more money.

When I was selecting a pano head, I looked at some of the others like the panosaurus and they just didn't look to be built well enough to give me confidence in trusting $1500 worth of equipment on it.

Yeah, I have found something else. The Panasaurus was OK by me, as much as I am going to use it, it would have worked. But, it only had a 1/4 mounting hole and I didn't want to mess with finding an adapter for 3/8 which my tripod uses. But, if you missed post then, I found this, and have ordered it already. Not only is this going to give the extra inch I need to get the nodal point over the pivot point, I can shoot it in 3D Stereo also.

http://www.berezin.com​/3d/slidebars.htm

Well, the piece that you see in the link in the last post there arrived yesterday. While I consider it a bit pricey, it is some of the best workmanship I have ever seen, and having worked in machine shops, I hace seen a lot. This thing is made like a Swiss watch. It has two detents, hard to see in that picture, but they are along the back side on either end. They prevent the slider from sliding off the main rail. Push them down and the slider can pass. The slider itself is not just machined dovetails, it has three wheels mounted on each side, in the slots, that have bearings in them. A nice touch. The brass tightening finger screw actually has braking material on the end of it. And, to top it off, it has a bullseye bubble level in one end of the main rail.