Nodal Ninja setup
Took out our Nodal Ninja setup out for our Leica C10 laser scanner today. If you don't know what a Nodal Ninja is, it is a bracketed camera mount that fits into a terrestrial laser scanner's tribrach. It provides a way of overlaying higher quality images onto scanned point clouds than are provided by the "web cam" like camera built into most laser scanners. The major advantage of the nodal ninja setup is that it enhances the color quality of the images and not so much that it adds resolution over the built in camera.
The images look incredible with our Cannon 5D Mark II with Sigma 8mm f/3.5 fish eye lens attached to the Nodal Ninja. The unbelievable field of view of the fish eye lens and 5D's full frame sensor gives the panorama advantages over just about any other camera used with this setup, allowing for almost perfect coverage with only three pictures, and near perfect exposure without a flash in just about all lighting conditions. This makes the camera ideal for taking pictures outside and from multiple scanning locations over the course of a day, since the 5D will give similar pictures regardless of the amount of sunlight.
I'm trying to get the work flow down for the Nodal Ninja so that we can use it next week on a scan project we have planned on the campus of East Carolina University.
The images look incredible with our Cannon 5D Mark II with Sigma 8mm f/3.5 fish eye lens attached to the Nodal Ninja. The unbelievable field of view of the fish eye lens and 5D's full frame sensor gives the panorama advantages over just about any other camera used with this setup, allowing for almost perfect coverage with only three pictures, and near perfect exposure without a flash in just about all lighting conditions. This makes the camera ideal for taking pictures outside and from multiple scanning locations over the course of a day, since the 5D will give similar pictures regardless of the amount of sunlight.
I'm trying to get the work flow down for the Nodal Ninja so that we can use it next week on a scan project we have planned on the campus of East Carolina University.
More to come soon...
