Acratech Levelling Base

The main reason I bought this was to do panoramas. I was sick of spending up to 10 minutes trying to get the tripod level for each pano shot. Now it just takes literally takes less than 10 seconds to get both my tripod base and my ballhead dead level.

The built quality is excellent, nice anodised finish and best of all only weighs about 250g. I really love the huge round spirit level as it makes it so easy to get the tripod level accurately and quickly.

Check out the large round spirit level

The large knob makes it so easy to loosen and tighten the levelling base. It also has a nice rubberised coating on it.

Love the large rubberised knob

Another view of the levelling base, as you can see the workmanship and finish is of a high standard.

Excellent build quality and finish

I have used it for a couple of weeks now and I am very happy with it. It is no longer a chore to take multiple pano shots as the levelling base makes it so easy to move around. With a level tripod it get rids of the staircase effect giving you more of the photo with little or no cropping required and perfect seamless stitching.

I can highly recommend the Acratech levelling base to anyone. At $150 USD I reckon it is money well spent.

Examples

Here are some of the panos from my testing of the Acratech levelling base.

Sydney Opera House - This 180° HDR Panorama consist of 7 separate shots in portrait mode. Each shot contains 3 exposures (-1, 0 +1), tripod, tone mapped using Photomatix Pro, stitched together in CS4 and tweaked in LR 2.0

View of Circular Quay from the Sydney Opera House - This 180° HDR panorama consists of 7 separate shots in portrait mode. Each shot contains 3 different exposures (-1, 0 +1), tripod, tone mapped using Photomatix Pro and stitched together using CS4 and tweaked in LR 2.0

Campbells Cove, Sydney, Australia - This 360° Panorama consists of 15 separate shots in portrait mode and stitched together using CS4 and tweaked in LR 2.0

Here is my pano setup - The Acratech Levelling base attached to my Really Right Stuff BH-40 ballhead with a Really Right Stuff nodal rail.

Go here for more info on the Acratech levelling base.

My first attempt at Panoramas

I've always wanted to learn how to do panoramas. For some reason I always thought that it was too damn fiddly so I filed it in the too-hard basket. Anyway my interest was peaked after a friend sent me his attempt at panorama. I noticed quite a few alignment problems, which I later learnt were cause by parallax errors. I wondered if I could do better.

I did a lot of reading on the internet on that topic and there are heaps of info on the causes and how to eliminate it. I first had to wrap my head around terms like nodal point, rotational axis and parallax errors. I later found out that the correct terminology is entrance pupil and not nodal point. There are loads of information and tutorial on how to achieve it.

I was salivating over a pano package from Really Right Stuff (RRS) could not justify paying over USD $360. After some thinking and I realised that I could use my panning BH-40 Pro II ballhead and MPR-192 rail from RRS.

Really Right Stuff MPR-192 rail

Really Right Stuff BH40 Pro II ballhead

Requirements

1. Calculate entrance pupil of lens. The entrance pupil of the lens must be directly above the rotational axis of the tripod to negate parallax errors.

2. Tripod - preferably a sturdy one.

3. Panning ballhead or a panning base. Excellent, the BH-40 has a panning base.

4. Slide rail. Luckily for me I had an old RRS MPR 192 slide rail which I originally bought to do macro photography but was not suitable as the movements were not smooth enough.

Entrance Pupil

This is how I found the entrance pupil of my Nikon 14-24mm. I place my speaker stand in the foreground and align it with a door frame in the background or any straight vertical line. I then look through the view finder and panned the camera left and right and adjust the position of the camera, by moving it either backwards or forwards on the rail. This process is repeated until the foreground and background objects stop moving when panning the camera left and right.

My D700 mounted on the RRS MPR 192 rail. As you can see from the photo above, the entrance pupil for the Nikon 14-24mm is towards the front of the lens roughly where the focus ring is.

The tripod must be dead level. This is the hardest part of the whole exercise, it takes a bit of time and lots of patience. It can be very frustrating especially when perched on a rock. I discovered that the spirit level on my Manfrotto 055PROB was crap. I wasted a few hours scratching my head wondering why I couldn't get the tripod level. I ended up using a two axes spirit level instead.

2-axes spirit level. You can get them on ebay.

Once the tripod is ready, make sure that the ballhead is level. The spirit bubble on the quick release plate is accurate but I double checked using the 2-axes level. Now you are ready to take some shots. Since I had no idea what I was doing I just took multiple shots, anywhere from 3 to 13 shots, in both portrait and landscape mode.

Panorama shot in portrait mode. This one comprise of 3 separate shots.

Panorama shot in portrait mode. This one comprise of 5 separate shots.

Panorama shot in landscape mode. This one comprise of 5 separate shots.

Panorama shot in portrait mode. This one comprise of 8 separate shots.
Click here for a larger view

Panorama shot in portrait mode. This one comprise of 13 separate shots.
Click here for larger view

All the shots were taken with my Nikon D700 and 14-24mm. I use Adobe LR2 and CS4 to do all my adjustments and stitching. I am very please with the results from my first attempt at panoramas. Now I would really keen to do more panoramas and also work to improve my technique.