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Agnos MRotator Panorama Head and the Nikon Coolpix 4500 with fish-eye lens. Tony Quinn June 2006. Having previously used various solutions for producing full spherical panoramas, I was looking forward to trying out the Agnos M Rotator panorama head. The AGNO'S head has a lot in its favour, the head grips the LENS rather than the camera, and therefore establishes the NODAL POINT correctly without any requirement for the photographer to set this. The click-stop base ensures shots are taken at the required intervals of rotation. The head is also very compact and lightweight, and easily fits inside a camera bag for transport. The Agnos heads are available for the range of Nikon Coolpix cameras with fish-eye lenses including the older model 950, 995, 4500 style and the newer higher resolution 5400, 8400, 8700 and 8800 models. Our choice of the 4500 was simply due to our having one of this model already available as one of our in-house cameras, at only 4 Megapixels this is now quite an old camera. Results using these techniques with the newer Coolpix models would doubtless yield higher quality results. Equipment: Agnos MRotatorA Panorama head [see image] Software: EasyPano Panoweaver 4.0 on Macintosh (also available for Windows!) Technique: The Coolpix 4500 has a menu choice to select 'F1' being the settings for the fish-eye lens attachment, I selected the highest shot resolution (NOT the 3:2 which will slightly crop the image). I find the best way to set the camera in use is to shoot manually, the FC-E8 has a maximum F-stop of just 5.3, so the shots taken outdoors in the sunshine of Kefalonia were usually a 2000th of a second shutter speed! White balance set for 'sun'. The set-up is then ready for use, and very quick, once the tripod is set and the kit is level I then shoot 3 shots, clicking each into place and firing off the photo. Some shots I produced using the self-timer, where I could see my long shadow on the ground would appear in shot, using the timer allows me to step back until the shot is taken. Stitching: Once back at base, the shots are downloaded to our desktop computer. I then refer back to my shot list and arrange all the sets of images in folders, 3 images for each location. The images are imported into EasyPano Panoweaver Version 4 and 'auto-stitched' to produce a finished panorama. The option is also available to save out the image as a JPEG file, which can be edited or adjusted (i.e. in Photoshop) and then re-imported prior to creating the panorama. You can see samples from the links below, and also view a complete tour of the Greek Island of Kefalonia produced in summer 2006 with these techniques ( I know its tough - but someone has to do it ). The photography from the Kefalonia VR tour is available on http://www.vrkefalonia.com IMAGE SAMPLES:
You can view an actual FULL RESOLUTION image stitched images i.e. the circular 'image strip' image stitched with the EasyPano software clicking here (caution - 4000 x 2000 pixels, file size 5.5Mb JPEG)
You can view the QuickTime Panorama produced from this image set by clicking here (opens new window to the Kefalonia tour) Page Views since 13th June 2006:
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