Adapter Bracket for Panoramic & Macro Flash Photography
A simple, inexpensive adapter bracket for mounting your camera in either landscape or portrait orientation on a tripod to take panoramic photos, or for mounting a flash for handheld macro photography. You can make this bracket for less than $10 in parts at the local hardware store (using a hacksaw and drill). The bracket permits you to align the lens aperture above the center of rotation, to maintain a constant perspective and avoid parallax errors that may ruin panoramic photos (double images that won't line up). The bracket makes it possible to stitch mutiple photos using panorama assembly software with good results, even when objects in the scene are nearby. This was my motivation for building it - I needed to create a panoramic image taken at closeup range while avoiding parallax errors, but I did not have a proper panoramic head for my tripod.
To further illustrate why you might need such a device and how to set it up and calibrate it, or to see commercially available tripod mounts, you may want to visit the web sites below. By the way, much has been published about using the "nodal point" of the lens to adjust a panoramic tripod head, however from what I gather in reading available opinions, "nodal point" is a misnomer in this context since the usual adjustment procedure to find the proper pivot point actually locates the "entrance pupil" of the lens, or the apparent location of the iris diaphragm (aperture). There's a good description of this by Doug Kerr. But it's a moot point anyway, since the recommended method for optimal adjustment involves a trial-and-error approach (adjust camera forward and backward, look, readjust, etc until things look correct TTL) rather than a calculation or measurement. I suggest starting at a point somewhere near the middle of the lens, or else just look into the lens and see where the aperture appears to be located (see photos below illustrating how to do this), then position that point above the tripod's axis of rotation - it will get you very close without performing the more cumbersome experimental calibration procedure.
