I am German.
I never laugh and never have fun.
By definition.
Mmmm... We better not go there! LOL Your comments seemed... A little serious? I do have a photo, somewhere, of the 1989? Le Mans 24Hr finish. The predominantly German stand, Mercedes, Porche banners... Was filled with spectators who were politely standing admiring the finish, a Porche won, by a few laps, the Jaguars had all died but the Brits were in raptures, waving flags, clambering over the 12ft wall onto the track etc. because the winning driver was British. Just an observation.
I am not sure you understood that I really like your project.
Well you did conceal your enthusiasm well! LOL
Technical annotation: The Nodal point is irrelevant for non parallax photography. You have to rotate around the entrance pupil. But you are right, the entrence pupil of the Nikkor AF-S 300mm f2.8 VR II is really -212.5mm ... IMO a non transportale design plus a 300mm tele lens does not make much sense for panoramic photography. You need to downsize the files significantly to have them rendering or a machnine, with -- what -- 2 Terabyte of RAM?
I realise the nodal point and the entrance pupil are different but informally most people tend to use the terms interchangeably. I did intend to cover that in my first post but forgot. By using a panoramic head I am hoping I will be able to create templates of the lens positions which will/should make the stitching process easier. I don't intend to do hundreds of panoramas but I have several locations in mind.
My intention with the 300mm isn't to make 360-180º pano's but for example there is a Priory Church near here which has the second? largest East window in the UK, it contains some original 16th century glass. I hope to be allowed to make a panorama of the window with the 300mm from as far back as possible so I'm not getting as much sky behind the glass and I will be viewing as level as possible without building a scaffold.
I worked on restoring the window and other parts of the priory, back in 1962 as an apprentice.
For most 360-180º panoramas I intend to use my 16mm fisheye with the D3. Six upright exposures around high (past the zenith), six low and a nadir.
I take panos both for fun and for clients since 2005, I found the 24mm and 35mm to be very useful. I get 800MP with the 1.4/24 on a D600...
between 60 and 150 Files per 180x360 is practical. 12GByte Panos are doable on my 64 GB RAM machine
I have an old Apple Mac Pro 4.1 which I hacked to 5.1 with a couple of SSD's + HD's I fitted 32Gb Ram but it actually runs slightly faster on 24Gb, unless Photoshop is swapping in and out of RAMdisk but with the SSD's it's marginal. I am considering fitting a couple of ultra fast M2 PCI SSD's which will make it fly. Although from what I have read PTGui doesn't make use of a lot of RAM, it's said to work on quite modest machines but never-the-less more RAM has to be good.
