Friday, May 23, 2003

I posed the question of how best to deal with a panhead which does not stay level: 1) adjust the level at every clickstop, or 2) ignore it. The problem with adjusting the level of your panhead using thumbwheel level adjustments as you pan around is this: Imagine (in the worst case) that you only move the thumbwheels in one direction only in order to achieve level at each click-stop. Then you are guaranteed that the nodal point of the lens will be in a new position vertically than when you started. The vertical nodal error gets compounded as you shoot multiple rows. How to avoid this? I guess you have to keep track of which thumbwheel has gone in which direction and try to undo it by the time you get back to zero degrees. That sounds like a fairly impossible proposition, as any given change of level may require movement of all three thumbwheels. The need to re-level at each click-stop is bad enough of a interruption in the shooting sequence, without having to remember which wheel went which way. The problem with ignoring off-levelness is you'll have to manually rotate those images in your stitching program for everything to stitch well. And the nodal point might be moving some too. The consensus amongst people who responded is that it is better to not change the leveling at every click-stop. 6:42:19 AM

Rob Galbraith mentions Lexar announces firmware fix for certain 32X, 40X CompactFlash, which fixes an incompatibility when used in the Nikon D1X, D1H. File (image) corruption could have resulted. 6:33:40 AM

MacCentral: It's QuickTime over RealPlayer in new AOL Windows beta. 6:30:03 AM

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