Motorized panoramic heads and GigaPan robots

A motorized panoramic head turns the camera through a programmed set of positions and fires the shutter at each one. That makes large multi-row and gigapixel panoramas repeatable and adds time-lapse and video moves. Makers include Seitz (Roundshot VR Drive), GigaPan (EPIC mounts) and Nodal Ninja.

Where they came from

Seitz, the Swiss maker of Roundshot cameras, says it introduced the first automated VR robot for panoramic stitching in 1990. That first VR Drive used a motor for the horizontal turn and triggered the camera automatically. Seitz launched the faster VR Drive "s" in 2010, and later versions added HDR, a built-in light meter and firmware updates.

GigaPan grew out of Pancam, the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Randy Sargent of NASA's Ames Research Center and Illah Nourbakhsh of Carnegie Mellon University led a team that turned the idea into a robotic mount for ordinary cameras, built with Charmed Labs of Austin, Texas. GigaPan Systems was founded in 2008 with support from Google.

A gigapixel shoot in practice: the 2009 inauguration

At Barack Obama's inauguration on January 20, 2009, photographer David Bergman clamped a GigaPan Imager to a railing, mounted a Canon G10 compact camera on it and let the robot take 220 photos of the crowd and the stage. Stitched together they made a single image of about 1,474 megapixels that viewers can zoom into.

The same rules apply to any gigapixel panorama:

• Lock exposure, focus and white balance, so every frame matches.
• Use a longer lens and more frames. Resolution comes from the number of narrow frames.
• Mind the wind. A long lens on a tall tripod magnifies every vibration; wait for it to settle at each position.
• Expect movement. People and traffic move between frames and can leave half-transparent "ghosts" where frames are blended.

What a motor adds

• Gigapixel images: hundreds or thousands of overlapping telephoto frames, shot in order without missing one.
• Repeatability: the same positions every time, which helps with HDR brackets and with re-shooting a scene.
• Time-lapse and video: slow, even pans over minutes or hours.
• Object movies: driving a turntable instead of the camera. See turntables.

The costs are weight, batteries and price, and a motor does not fix a badly set no-parallax point. Set the camera up as you would on a manual head first.

Motorized heads to look at today

• Roundshot VR Drive, in full two-axis, horizontal-only and turntable kits. A "Metric" version pairs it with a fixed camera and lens for 200-megapixel spherical panoramas.
• Nodal Ninja robotic heads.
• GigaPan EPIC mounts, which take almost any digital camera.