Pano bracket

My homemade panorama bracket

Not too long ago I got a new tripod. I had in mind to take some 360 by 360 spherical panoramas to create environment maps and use them to do some projections in Nuke and maybe use them for image based lighting or environment lights later on. When doing that, it is very important that there is as minimal parallax as possible (ideally none) when taking the pictures so there are no problems when stitching them together. In order to avoid parallax the camera should rotate exactly around its nodal point. Using the tilt function on the tripod to point upwards or downwards we are moving the camera off centre and that is no-good, and if you use the portrait function on the tripod this moves the camera off centre A LOT. So in order to take these pictures it is necessary to use a panorama bracket.

A panorama bracket is basically an L-shaped adapter that goes onto the tripod and instead of placing the camera on the tripod you attach it to the bracket. This way you can manually rotate the camera in the bracket and then rotate the tripod while maintaining the nodal point always in the same place.

After buying my tripod I went online and looked for one of those panorama brackets, only to find out that they are insanely expensive! I understand everything photo/video-related is expensive but paying $300-400 dollars for a piece of metal seemed stupid to me so I went online and looked for DIYs. I found many people using wood and stuff from hardware stores so I went to one. I was there picking metal pieces, bolts, nuts, and whatever I thought could be useful to build my own bracket. What I found didn’t seem good enough but I was going to take it anyways. I was on my way to the register to pay when I came across this:

Adjustable Balcony Planter Brackets for $5.99

It seemed exactly what I needed. A metal L-shaped bracket with holes in the centre and it was black. I left all other items I had with me and just kept a couple of bolts and a wingnut I would need. I went home and minutes later for less than 10 bucks I had my own panorama bracket. And honestly much better looking than the DIYs I saw other people make.

I had a really cheap tripod I got on eBay which broke after a few days so I used its plate for mounting the camera to it. It had a bubble level which was good. I also used one its plastic pieces and put a bolt and a nut through it to use as grip.

Obviously it is not perfect. There is still some parallax but is very minimal. It is not exactly sturdy and if there is strong wind it can cause blurry images if using a slow shutter speed, but for the price it’s excellent. Also, I noticed that usually these type of brackets have an additional arm to move the camera sideways to adjust according to the size of the lens since the nodal point is considered to be by the front of the lens. I didn’t seem to need that arm. It could be because I have a compact mirrorless camera and a really small pancake lens. Maybe with bigger lens I might need it, but I still have some parts from the balcony planter and I can easily adapt it. 

My tripod for some reason doesn’t rotate exactly in its centre axis. You can see from the main picture above that where the plate is doesn’t line up with the centre column. What I had to do is to place the camera pointing down at the tripod, then I put some piece of string and matched the string to the grids on my camera’s screen. Then I rotated the camera 90 degrees and did the same. I had to adjust the bracket until I got the string aligned in both directions.

I already took some pictures for a pan and tile setup and creating latlongs. Using 7-exposure bracketing and creating 32-bit EXRs.