Pan/Tilt Panoramic Tripod Head

Panoramic tripod heads that allow to pan and tilt around the no-parallax-point use to be quite expensive. Usually, some kind of (expensive) levelling device is needed in addition to the pano-head in order to allow panning precisely in the horizontal plane.

Since I owned a ball-head with a panorama mount anyway, I thought about how it could be upgraded to be a real pan/tilt/level-panorama head with the least possible effort. In addition to that, I wanted it to be adjustable to be able to adapt to different cameras, so it needed to have the mounting point adjustable in relation to the pivoting axis.

The solution came in form of a special extruded aluminum profile, which a neighbor of my parents used to construct a milling system (source of supply for example: http://www.item24.com or http://www.aluprofil.com/ "Profile 5 60x20"). The profile is lightweight and very rugged and it allows for easy corner joints. One of the grooves in the profile turned out to be able to accept a slideable tripod mount.

To assemble the pan/tilt-head, I needed to machine an adapter for my ball- head to be able to mount the head upside down onto the tripod and the profile onto the panorama-plate of the ball head. This arrangement allows me to easily level the whole setup and still have a smooth and clearance-free horizontal adjustment.