To find your lens’s nodal point for panoramic photography, you can use a tripod, two vertical objects, and live view on your camera. The nodal point is the point around which you should rotate the camera to avoid parallax and stitching problems.
**Steps **
Set up your tripod and camera so that it’s level
Position two vertical objects, like poles, on the ground so that they overlap when viewed through the camera
Turn on live view and position the camera so that the poles are in the center of the frame
Rotate the camera while looking for lens distortion
Move the camera back and forth until the poles continue to overlap when you rotate the camera
Tips
If you’re using a zoom lens, you’ll need to find the nodal point for each focal length you want to use
You can use a nodal slider to help you find the nodal point
A simple method ...
An easier way to find the NPP is to just put something thin like a
Pole or wire near the lens and align it with a more distant object. Rotated the camera about the NPP, the alignment of the two objects occurs both when they are at the image center and at each side.
If the camera rotates and aligned objects in the image center appear to separate, this shows that the rotation is not about the NPP. This method may be simpler than the first method described, but is more fiddly and less accurate.
We positioned a 10 mm dowel 7 m in front of the camera to determine the NPP of a Nikon 18-70 mm zoom lens set at 18 mm; this aligned it with the apex of a house roof 200 m away. Rotating the camera around the tripod mounting point (behind the NPP), I showed the dowel’s apparent movement relative to the roof apex if the camera is not rotated about the NPP. A similarly distant point in front of the NPP illustrated this movement.
The camera’s rotation about the NPP maintains the dowel’s alignment with the house roof apex at both the left and right image edges. Note that this is at the NPP for that angle of incidence if the lens does not have a single point for the NPP, as in some examples following.
The tripod mounting point behind the NPP was the point about which the camera rotated. This is the normal case for a camera mounted on a tripod using the ¼” thread on the camera’s base plate. The dowel appears to the left of the apex of the roof at the left-hand edge of the image and to the right of the apex of the roof at the right-hand edge of the image.
To show the effect of camera rotation in front of the NPP, they mounted the camera on a bar so the rotation point was roughly as far in front of the NPP as the ¼” thread on the camera’s base plate is behind it. The dowel appears to the right of the apex of the roof at the left-hand edge of the image and to the left of the apex of the roof at the right-hand edge of the image.
