Low cost (80USD) head for panoramic exposures

[kyber]

Take a look at the Panasaurus (http://gregwired.com/pano/pano.htm) - a low cost panoramic head for your tripod.

I am sure many have had fun stiching together a series of photographs to provide wide panoramics. Some of the software around is now very good at working even with hand-held shots and doing a convincing job of sorting out the distortions caused by the different viewpoints used by the camera during the series of exposures.

If you want to get really good results and avoid problems with objects in the foreground in particular, then you need a panoramic head that lets you rotate your camera in carefully measured steps around the nodal point of the focal plane.

However, panoramic heads can be expensive. Until now. An artist in the USA has made a cheap one. I just imported one from the USA to the UK as a present for my wife (to go with her brand new Nikon D80 - it was a big birthday milestone). She has a lot more patience than me so is likely to make good use of the device.

It looks a little "heath-robinson" but does the job - better than some more expensive models in some cases.

(I have no commercial interest in this item - just sharing with togs.)

[england1965]

Thanks for that - do you know if you end up getting stung for import tax or VAT?

Cheers

Mark

[kyber]

I didn't. Pot luck as always. The guy did not try to disguise what it was in anyway.

I import a lot of stuff from HK and USA and rarely get stung (and even when I do it is cheaper than the UK price).

I brought a Nikon D80 with a 18-200mm VR lens from Digital Rev recently. i have bought many things from them. Sometimes from their online store and sometimes from their ebay store. This happened to be from ebay and was one guarenteed free of VAT and import duties (they refund you if you get stung). Ordered on a Monday, delivered on Friday the same week. I could not get the lens itself delivered in the UK that quickly at the time. I saved several hundred pounds.

YMMV.

Stuart