Kaidan KiWi Panoramic Tripod Head manual Record Your Results, How About Rangefinder Cameras?

Nodal Point (continued)

What is it and how do I find it?

viewfinder, find another vertical edge or line that is far away, such as another building or telephone pole.Align the two objects and rotate the pan head so they are in the left hand side of the viewfinder.

Rotate the pan head so the two objects move over to the right hand side of the viewfinder. Unless you’ve managed to unwittingly locate the right position, you should notice the two objects will move with respect to each other as you rotate the pan from left to right. Slide the camera to the front or rear as required to eliminate this relative movement.

Step 3: Record Your Results

After you’ve discovered the two location dimensions, be sure to record the settings.The KiWi has convenient indicator scales for this purpose. These numbers represent the nodal point for this given camera and lens combination. If you change cameras or lenses, this procedure may have to be repeated

Step 5: How About Rangefinder Cameras?

A rangefinder camera is a camera

Looking through the viewfinder align a close object (brick wall) with a faraway object (telephone pole).As you rotate the camera from side-to-side there should be no relative movement between the two objects as shown to the right.

If, as shown above, the two objects move with respect to one and another in the viewinder, slide the camera fore or aft in order to eliminate this movement. Here, the telephone pole has moved behind the brick wall.

where you look through a separate viewfinder and not through the actual lens. The process is basically the same. Locate the Side-to-Side adjustment as discussed in Step 1.When it comes to the Fore-Aft adjustment, you won’t be able to look through the viewfinder to determine the proper setting since the viewfinder is a separate optical path that doesn’t really “see” the same image as the film.

Instead, you’ll have to start with the bracket all the way to the front and take pairs of test shots. Each pair will have the vertically aligned objects in the left and then the right side

of the viewfinder.After each pair of photos, slide the bracket rearward and repeat the process. Slide the bracket the same increment each time (i.e. 10mm). Be sure to record the scale setting for each pair of images. Process the film, or in the case of digital cameras, download the images to your computer.

At the end of this process you will be able locate the pair of images with the least relative movement. If no single image is optimum, you may need to interpolate between two images to find the closest value.

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