Staff Training Day - With Cullmann

Yesterday's staff training concentrated upon Cullman products and one of the bits really caught my eye. I'll be careful in future about bending over near the shelves. The doctor says it is just a bruise and I should be fine in a week.

Moving on from there - here is the device: the Cullmann answer to panoramic pictures.

The bottom turntable fastens to the head of your tripod - it could be a Cullmann, which is an easy bolt-on, or another maker's head - equally easy after a little wrangling. You can use a ball head, a three-way head, or a leveler.

This turntable has a precise Arca-Swiss sized jaws on the top and into this the L-shaped bracket just glides.

You position your camera anywhere on the horizontal or vertical arms of the bracket for landscape or portrait orientation depending on the coverage you want and the nodal point of your lens.

Note - there may be a table somewhere on the internet that gives nodal point measurements for camera and lens combinations. I haven't found it yet but would be grateful to any reader who could research it. I just play mine by ear with a simple field measurement.

Well, you level the table, set your exposure and focus manually, overlap the images and shoot away. This combination of components ensures that your computer program is presented with the best material for stitching - provided you have enough computer power in there to do it. You'll get more even and square panoramas.

The really attractive thing about these components is the combination of precision, affordability, and light weight. You can haul this out into the landscape at less than half the weight of the other well-known rival. If you are packing your own gear and not using bearers or mules this is a very good thing to discover...

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