I recently learned about the “Nodal Point” in the photography context. If you rotate a lens around this point while taking multi-image panoramic pictures, you will not get any parallax error. It turns out that there’s actually a tripod specifically designed for this use: the Nodal Ninja.
I did a quick search on Wikipedia to learn more about the Nodal Point before writing this post and learned that in fact the term Nodal Point is a misnomer. The point around which you have to rotate the camera to get a panorama is actually the center of the lens’ entrance pupil. Fortunately, the Nodal Ninja folks point this out on their home page – the other name for this point is the No Parallax Point; however, it seems that folks in photography have started and stuck to calling it the nodal point, and so the misnomer continues.
The Nodal Ninja is a cool device worth considering if you’re going to be taking lots of panoramas (e.g. if you’re going to the Southwest). Another similar device, though more expensive, is the GigaPan EPIC Pro.
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