I recently spent a good chunk of my nights in my basement building a bracket to shoot panoramas. This first prototype is made of 1/4 inch aluminum and stainless steel hardware. It attaches a Canon 1D MarkII digital camera body with a Canon 15mm fisheye lens, to a video tripod. The brackets is used so “that the axis of the camera’s rotation is positioned at the entrance pupil of the lens,” according to vrphotography.com, a site dedicated to the art of virtual reality photography such as panoramas. Basically, the lens needs to be the point of the rotation, not the camera. Read more about the details here.

There are dozens of companies that sell them (Panorama Brackets, Pinnacle, Nodal Ninja), but the cost ($150 to $1000+) is beyond our department’s budget. So I searched the web and found this very helpful tutorial to build your own. For under $70, I have my own panorama bracket. I’m in the process of building a second bracket using thicker aluminum for more stability. You can find examples of our first pano project on the Missouri Botanical Garden.

Share your panoramas or your homemade photo gear by emailing a photo to me (hmach@post-dispatch.com), and I can add it to this blog.