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This page is seriously out of date. Watch this space; I may update it.
This is one of my pages about panoramas, describing the hardware you can use to make panoramas. If it ever gets finished, it aims to be as succinct as possible, and it makes many claims that it doesn't substantiate. See the details page for the whole story.
At the moment the page is a mess. It's more interesting to show my learning experience with panorama hardware than anything else. Read on if you still want to...
The purpose of all panorama hardware is to help prepare the images needed for optimal stitching, avoiding problems such as the ones above. There are a number of functions that it can perform. Typically each is performed by a different component. Here's a summary of the requirements:
Leveling is worth thinking about in more detail. My problem was that the tripod was frequently not on level ground, so the central column wasn't vertical, and I was looking for a leveller that would swivel relative to the tripod head below it. But that's not necessary: if you level the tripod head and then leave it static and rotate the bracket relative to the head, you've achieved the same thing. Probably for this reason, none of the hardware I found has a separate swivel function.
I already have the ability to rotate the camera about the nodal point (criterion 1), and criterion 4, the equally-spaced rotation is more “nice to have” than “must have”, but the other two are important. I've mentioned the trouble levelling the camera, and the immediate cause of my search is the vertical orientation, which I just can't get at the moment. There are devices that seem fulfil all of the requirements. But the prices blew me away! And they don't really seem to relate to the utility of the device. It's clear that I've left the domain of commodity equipment.
The simplest ones only fulfil criterion 2. They only rotate on the level. They're barely better than a pan(orama) and tilt head: the only real advantage is that they have a degree scale. The cheapest I found was the Lenspen adaptor plate at US $17.
Novoflex seems to be a name that you'll find everywhere in the panorama game, and it's one you have to pay for. If $17 is too little to spend, you can spend up to $725 to get something very similar to the Lenspen, the Universal Pro panorama plate. Compared to the LensPen it's “Pro”, of course, and undoubtedly better quality. It offers click stops at preset intervals (criterion 4, 8 steps between 10° and 60°), while with the LensPen you have to read the angles manually. For another $130 you can get a quick release plate that maintains the nodal point distances and helps with changeover from horizontal to vertical, though I wouldn't call it automatic. That's a total of $855, for which you can buy quite a good DSLR body, but it does fulfil all criteria.
Of course, if you have money to burn, you don't need to stop there. The Novoflex VR-PRO kit costs US $1,245 and fulfils all requirements, though I'm still not sure how good the change from horizontal to vertical is.
The Vista Panorama bracket seems to fulfil criterion 3, the ability to switch from horizontal to vertical, but it appears to be only manual. With a pan head it would also fulfil criterion 1. It doesn't seem to address the other requirements, which makes its price (US $149, or $119 on eBay) rather high.
The first adaptor I saw was on eBay, and irritatingly doesn't have a non-eBay page that I can find. The price blew me away: about US $288. It wasn't until I looked more carefully that I found that this is in fact not a bad price by comparison. It fulfils all the requirements above, including—it seems—gimbal-based automatic switching from horizontal to vertical, and 10 swivel increments between 5° and 60°. About the only thing it doesn't have is a second rotation plate for the camera when mounted vertically; but you can buy a LensPen for $17.
Then there's another similar product on the market, also eBay. It's difficult to say what it does, because the description is so poor, and the photos show the thing only folded together. But it doesn't seem to have the gimbal mounting, and it costs US $366, $78 or so more than the other, so I think it would lose out.
Then there are things like the GigaPan Epic 100, which not only gives you a mount, but also a computer to process the panorama for you. I can't see much use in that, but maybe others do. In this price range I'd prefer to pick the best component for each function, rather than take a grab bag.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about panorama brackets, and it's clear that my previous criteria could have been stated more logically:
The first criterion is the important one; you can achieve the other two by other means. And that shows how difficult it is to determine whether the offerings on eBay are useful or not. About all you can see is that the people who took the photos didn't understand the problems, as evidenced by the best photo from the eBay vendor LinkDelight:
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The camera is too low—the axis of the lens must be the same as the axis of the pivot above—and it's pointing in the wrong direction to allow more than one of the pivot axes to go through the nodal point. There's also no adjustment along the lens axis. You could fix both of these by turning the camera to the right and lifting it to the pivot axis, but then the pivot would just rotate the camera around the lens axis. I can't think of any locations of interest there except for vertical and horizontal; it would be useless for vertical panoramas. What's missing here is a third rail. If we left the camera in the orientation it has and mounted it on a rail enabling it to be moved along the lens axis, it might work. But this bracket doesn't seem to have that.
Then took a look at Wikipedia and found—as so often nowadays—a lot of useful information, including a description page with an animated GIF with an amazingly incongruous background. There are also a lot of links to follow, including a do-it-yourself “Nodal Samurai” for $2.50 in some unspecified currency (the page comes from the UK, so it's not local). The unusual name is clearly a word play on Nodal Ninja, another manufacturer of this kind of equipment. More stuff to investigate.
More investigation of panorama mountings today. Yesterday I looked at the online shops, and today I tried the more logical step of looking for online documentation. On the face of it, Nodal Ninja looks like a good choice, but all the illustrations show it with the camera mounted in portrait position, and there's no obvious way to switch to landscape. Why is all this stuff so complicated?
I'm still pondering what to do with panorama mount hardware. The criteria I stated last month are still valid, I think. And you can achieve them all with home-made equipment, up to a point. The issues with home-made brackets such as the “Nodal Samurai” and the wooden head are mainly flexibility and configurability.
In particular, I want something that will allow me to pan in a horizontal plane. Traditional pan and tilt heads swivel on the vertical axis of the tripod, which is only completely vertical when the tripod is mounted on a plane, or when the lengths of the tripod legs are adjusted. At the moment I do the latter, but it's painful, made even more painful by the fact that adjusting any leg affects the level in two directions, since there are only 3 legs. Ideally I could mount my pan and tilt head on top of a ball head, but of course the threads are different, and I'd be concerned about stability.
Went looking Yet Again for this particular piece of hardware. In the process, took a look at what Adorama have to offer. In the past I've bought my photo equipment from B&H, because their web site isn't as painful. For some reason, the Adorama web pages seem to cause the X server to use incredible amounts of CPU time, even when they're not doing some silly animation. But they have quite a selection of QTVR Panoramic & Object Equipment. QTVR? Another example of the emphasis on the code rather than on the data. Who cares how you process the image? The hardware is related to the raw images, not the final result. But it seems modern to concentrate on the process rather than the results.
I have already mentioned the very cheap LensPen rotators. Adorama have their own version, the Adorama Panamatic PMTC-1, for about the same price. From the reviews, it appears that it's made out of plastic, and the reviews were all very negative, particularly with regards to stability. And that's with the camera mounted directly on top. Put a panorama bracket on it, and the offset weight will probably break the thing altogether.
Then there's a surprisingly cheap (for the manufacturer) Manfrotto Basic QTVR Panorama Head Adapter for only $50. Surprise! According to the reviews, it doesn't seem to do anything. I wonder what the purpose is.
There are still others that I need to investigate. A somewhat orthogonal item (in multiple senses) is the Stroboframe Vertaflip PHD. It's also called a rotator, but it just switches the camera between horizontal and vertical orientation while maintaining the lens axis—one of the criteria I mentioned last month, and one that nothing so far has fulfilled. Looking at the construction, it's clear that it can only maintain the axis in these two positions, but that's enough. Also from the construction, the camera needs to fit one of its preconceived ideas of distance between base plate and lens axis. But it gets good reviews, and it's not very expensive, so it looks like a good choice.
| Sunday, 11 July 2010 | Diary entry |
The Bureau of Meteorology had forecast rain today, but it was a nice sunny day, and my biggest problem was taking my panoramas into the sun:
This was also the first time I tried out the dual head panorama levelling system with the panorama head mounted on top of a ball head:
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The ball head allows me to position the panorama head in a horizontal plane. Previously I had been doing that by adjusting the legs of the tripod, which was a real pain, since the legs aren't perpendicular to each other. The “correct” way to do this seems to be to buy a leveling plate such as the Manfrotto 338 3416, which sells for US $95:
I'm not even convinced that the levelling plate does it better. It's limited to 5° adjustment in each direction, and it has the same disadvantage as levelling the tripod legs, in that the adjustments aren't orthogonal. It does have the distinct advantage of stability; there's quite a moment on the ball head, and I have to tighten it strongly to stop it tipping. And while adjusting it I have to take up the moment myself. But the ball head was just lying around, and even if I had bought one, it would be considerably cheaper than the Manfrotto plate. As it was, my total investment to date has been 32¢.
My attempt to get hold of a Pano-MAXX bracket seems to have failed: my contact person hasn't responded for nearly a month. In the meantime I'm not even sure if I want one. Did more investigation and came up with at least three possibilities:
The LinkDelight K7G head that I've looked at before. It's very clear that the photos were taken by somebody who doesn't understand the issues, and I'm still trying to clarify whether it can do the job. But it looks pretty solidly made.
A new offering from eBay vendor memorycardsman. There seems to be no definitive page for it, but it's called the “FT-900H Precision 360 degrees Panoramic Tripod Head”, and it looks similar in concept to the Pano-MAXX or the LinkDelight. Did some investigation, with the help of Andys and Callum Gibson, and came across some of the most damning reviews I've ever seen, translated from the Russian with Google translate, which just adds to the amusement:
This low-quality product I have not seen a long time. I do not know how to describe flaws, a lot of them.
The workmanship is terrible. The Chinese have surpassed themselves. Paint disgusting clambered from slightest touch.
Level come off even before the purchase, stuck, but good of him not because he is lying shamelessly.
The lining of the probkoreziny become detached immediately, the Chinese stuck them on the 2-sided tape. And the figs with them, they prominayutsya, resulting in a camera does not take a strictly vertical position, the slack in the side.
Scale - is generally a masterpiece! Moreover, they are printed on adhesive piece of paper, so they are generally meaningless, because track position on him is impossible. The scale of the horizontal slope generally stuck with a shift to 20 degrees.
Clip-lock turning heads around the vertical axis does not work, because it is short, even a fully wrapped head no stopper.
Horizontal hinge Chinese lubricated, so it is not fixed, slides.
All clamping screws have a pen with a small diameter of the slippery plastic, it is impossible to tighten them.
Still have a few flaws, too lazy to write.
Somehow I think I'll give this one a miss.
The Benro GH3, which they position as a gimbal head, but which looks like it should do the job. But it's not clear if it has click stops like the other ones, and it's a lot more expensive.
Spent some time updating the Panotools Wiki page, but didn't come to any particular conclusion.
One of the problems I've been having with my vertical panoramas is keeping things in position. The big issue is the screw that holds the focusing rail to the L bracket, on the top left:
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In this configuration, the weight of the camera and the flash are too much for the little holding screw, and the whole thing sags as seen here. Yes, I can tighten up the screw—I have used a little pipe wrench for this purpose—but I'm wondering if the screw itself has the tensile strength. It's very possible that the screw will snap, leaving a thread inside the focusing rail. Clearly what's needed here is some auxiliary support, so put one together out of some offcuts of the floor of the verandah:
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It's quick and dirty, and it requires a new piece of wood for each angle. But with the 9 mm wide angle lens, you really only need three angles, and one is the angle in the first photo (wood length 0 mm), so I only needed two pieces of wood, though it did take me a while to trim them to the right length.
The real question, though: do professional adapters do any better? I've seen lots of complaints about the stability of expensive brackets. I'd be really unhappy if I bought one and discovered that it was less stable than what I have now.
| Wednesday, 27 April 2011 | Diary entry |
I've been looking for better panorama hardware for a long time now, and I've gradually come to the conclusion that I should buy purpose-built hardware rather than trying to make my own. But what?
For some time I have had my eye on a bracket from a company called Linkdelight. It looks as if it might be able to do the job, but the images don't show it clearly; what they do show is that whoever took them didn't understand panoramic photography. They have a question section on their web site, so asked a question. But it seems that they either don't want to answer questions, or they only look by once in a blue moon. There are a number of unanswered questions there, and after a week mine is still unanswered. They also trade on eBay as link-delight-na, and they had one for sale there too. Tried to ask a question there, and for the first time I've seen on eBay, I was told that the vendor did not want any more questions.
Since writing this, the vendor has stopped offering this item anywhere except in North America, and the link I posted here is gone. I went into some detail about the bracket in October 2011.
So my search continued, and today I found a used Manfrotto 303PLUS (yes, shouted, it seems) head along with a levelling base.
More expensive than the Linkdelight bracket, but it's clear that they knew what they were doing, and the Linkdelight bracket didn't have the levelling base. It was going with “Buy it now”, so did some research and finally bought the thing. Only later did it occur to me that it's not complete after all; there's no obvious provision for rotating the camera around the horizontal axis. I can find a way to do that utilizing my current hardware, but why is this stuff so fraught with difficulties?
| Tuesday, 10 May 2011 | Diary entry |
Spent some time looking at the new Manfrotto 303PLUS panorama head. Parts of it are excellent.
It's worth looking back at the criteria I identified a year ago:
Interestingly, it does all this, but only because I didn't state criterion 1 carefully enough. It should read:
And it doesn't fulfil that criterion. It only rotates around a vertical axis:
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In addition, it requires that the camera lens axis be horizontal. That's an extreme restriction, and it makes me wonder what they were thinking of when they designed it. It's not cheap—the new price at B & H is $400, without the levelling base shown in these images. Even a normal pan head can tilt, and the Manfrotto 804RC2 costs only $68.
What's needed, of course, is pretty much the same as what I have already put together, a second pivot with a horizontal axis. That's as simple as an L bracket between the two slides:
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Or it should be. A problem becomes clear when you try to mount a camera on the thing:
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The problem is that the camera now has to point 90° from the way it was intended. And that doesn't work, because the mounting plate is hexagonal, so you can only mount it at 30° either side of the correct direction. And then the axis of rotation doesn't go through the nodal point, as the third image shows.
I still need to work out what to do here. The plate is mounted with screws (see the second photo above with the L bracket), so I could drill new holes and mount it at 30° from where it was intended. But in view of the resale value (and resale is very much on the cards), I suspect it would be better to buy another el cheapo focusing rail on eBay.
Apart from that, the supplied L (“elbow”) bracket, apparently part number 340, is more than puzzling. It must be one of the most baroque pieces of equipment I have seen. I've already commented on the hexagonal mounting plates, but it's amazingly complicated. What it should have is some kind of adjustment, so that the lens axis doesn't change when you switch from horizontal to vertical. That's not provided for. Instead, it has a second screw (⅜") for large cameras, an alternative mounting point for a Nikon MD4, a “safety peg” for heavy telephoto lenses and another peg whose function is neither described nor clear, but which can be seen in the middle of the first image below:
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And for all that, I can't easily mount my Asahi Pentax SV vertically on it. If I mount it as shown in the instructions, the lens axis is always too far to the left, not above the axis of rotation of the head. I can mount the camera the other way round on the bracket, and then I can adjust it correctly, but that only works with vertical orientation. When I try to mount it horizontally, a funny and apparently useless projection from the MD4 mount fouls the mounting plate:
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Instead, I need to turn the camera around on the bracket to point in the opposite (originally intended) direction. And when I do that, I also have to adjust the horizontal position by about 1 cm. That's not the intention.
Of course, who takes panoramas with an SV any more? I certainly don't. I chose it for these photos because I needed my Olympus E-30 to take the photos, and the SV is a nice looking camera. I considered the possibility that the problem only exists because the SV is so small (it is, after all, a full frame camera), but the same problem occurs with my E-30 as well.
Apart from that, the build quality is excellent. The levelling plate works, though I'm sure the range is nothing like what I need; I'll find myself playing with the tripod legs again, I'm afraid. But I'm puzzled that a company like Manfrotto could build such a badly conceived system. Was it a design study done by students?
| Thursday, 12 May 2011 | Diary entry |
So I've come up with a plan to work around the serious defects of the Manfrotto 303PLUS panorama head. In the process I found that I can reposition the mounting for the L bracket slightly, which would solve the adjustment problem I mentioned a couple of days ago. Or I should be able to:
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The problem is that one of the screws was done up so tight that the Allen key killed the socket, and I can't get it out. Spent quite some time trying to drill it out, but paradoxically it seems that the rest of the screw is so solid that I can't drill through it, and I want to avoid damaging the rail itself. Somehow these screws are another indication of brain damage in the design of the rail. For some reason there are two different screws with different shapes, though the thread is the same:
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Why do they do that? It doesn't make any sense, and it seems that the dished recess for the right-hand screw makes it easy to overtighten it. It's clearly stuck to the rail and not the mount, which I can move slightly, but not enough to unscrew it. I'll have to consider alternative ways of removing it. What a pain!
| Saturday, 14 May 2011 | Diary entry |
House photo day again today. I had intended to take the photos with the new panorama hardware, but it wasn't really ready. About the only thing I used was the Manfrotto 3416 leveling base, which even Manfrotto doesn't want to know about. They have replaced it with the model 338, which looks pretty much identical to me. So I mounted that on the tripod, replacing the ball head I had previously been using, and put the pan and tilt head on top of that:
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What did I get out of that? It wasn't all positive. On the one hand, I got much better leveling—the spirit level is much more sensitive than on the old ball head—and the base was much more stable than the ball head, which tended to move when I adjusted the pan and tilt head. But on the other hand, as I suspected, adjustments are less than perfect. Firstly the 120° orientation of the adjusting screws makes it difficult to adjust correctly, and then there's a very limited adjustment range further hampered by the lack of any “reset to mid-point” functionality. So I had to resort to changing the length of the tripod legs, which is exactly what this base is supposed to eliminate. Once again, it seems, an expensive tool that doesn't really do what it is intended for.
Last week I took photos into the sun with additional images where I blocked out the sun with my hand. That was a great improvement, but I'm not there yet. I blocked out too much, and as a result the images look burnt out in areas where it's not necessary:
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Today I tried with something smaller, a teaspoon:
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It's still not perfect—probably that's not possible without retouching with GIMP or similar—but it's a lot better.
| Monday, 23 May 2011 | Diary entry |
Today the weather was finally—just—good enough to take the house photos, with a few more parts of the new Manfrotto 303PLUS panorama head:
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Last week I just used the leveling head. This week I had the main part of the panorama head as well, including the rotator. How did it go? I've found more problems, of a more basic nature.
Firstly, yes, the leveling base is becoming a nuisance. It has only two advantages over the much cheaper ball head I was using before:
It's more stable.
It has a better spirit level, allowing more accurate adjustments.
But that's all. It's bulky and difficult to adjust, and in particular it doesn't have the range, so I'm still continually changing the length of the tripod legs. But if I do that, I don't need the leveling head except for the spirit level. And there must be a cheaper way to get that, possibly electronic.
And the panorama bracket? Well, the layout is almost unchanged, so there wasn't much difference except for the rotator with the click stops. That is “nice to have”, but it didn't stop me taking one shot too few on one occasion:
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I only took 11 instead of 12 shots, and there's a little bit missing at the bottom towards the right. I've left it that way because it's part of a series. Apart from that, there are disadvantages too: if I want to take less than a 360° panorama, the start and end points are important. The following 180° photo is made from 6 shots taken at 30° increments:
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Clearly the start and end points are important, and I used to do this by manually selecting directions 30° apart. But now I'm locked in to particular directions, and I can't select the starting point. The only way to move the head so that the start point is somewhere in between is to rotate the tripod. So I set it to 15° and took every second detent. Not quite the comfort I was looking for.
As if that wasn't enough, there are protrusions on the bracket that limit the angle that the camera can be turned towards the ground:
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In particular, the brass screw at the top right appears in the picture if the camera is tilted too far down. Of course, this bracket isn't designed for that sort of thing, but it's completely unnecessary and somehow an indication of the limited thought that has gone into designing the bracket.
In summary, I don't really have much more than I had before. The big part is still to come: rotating the lens about the nodal point when mounted horizontally.
It's gradually becoming clear that my purchase of the Manfrotto 303PLUS panorama head was a mistake. It's full of strange baroque “features”, but it doesn't do what I want: it's designed to take photos only in vertical orientation and with the lens axis pointing horizontally. In addition, the leveling base is a real pain, and I still need to adjust the tripod legs in many cases. About the best thing about it is its resale value, so I should realize that.
But what do I replace it with? Did some searching on eBay and came up with a number of new brackets, all from Linkdelight. They're not an unknown company: six months ago I was looking at a bracket from them, and decided that it was designed and presented by people who didn't understand the purpose of the brackets. It seems that they have discovered this too, and though they have it on sale, it's only available in the USA. Before it disappears altogether, here are some views of it:
The first two images clearly show the camera mounted too low and too far forward. It also appears to be only possible to mount the camera horizontally, somewhat out of keeping with current usage. I suspect that you can compensate for that with a macro rail, but it's not clear that you can lift the camera high enough to be on the axis of the horizontal pivot.
Since then, though, they have come out with no less than three other items at significantly lower prices:
The cheapest currently costs only US 67.63. Once again it's clear that whoever mounted it doesn't have any idea of how it should be used:
Here the camera is pointing 90° from the correct direction, it's mounted too low, and the non-adjustable mounting point is not above the vertical axis point of the rotator. Alone, this bracket is useless.
But it can be fixed. It's clear that the L bracket where the camera is mounted can be raised, almost certainly enough to bring it in line with the horizontal pivot axis. And mount a two-way macro rail on the thing and you can bring the nodal point above the vertical axis, as long as it doesn't foul the rather-too-close side bar. About the only thing that's not certain is whether the camera can be mounted vertically. And of course it's not clear what kind of rotator this has, if any.
The next one costs $74.66 and looks significantly solider. It also has some kind of rotator (probably without detents), and possibly the mounting point is above the vertical axis of the rotator. It also has a compass mounted vertically in the side rotator. But it looks unlikely that it will support mounting the camera in a vertical position.
The third one is an enigma. According to that page, it costs $89.99. Not enough? Go to eBay and pay $1,144.69 for exactly the same item. What kind of nonsense is that?
The photos show an almost correct mounting for the camera, along with a lot of potential ways of mounting it. The first image would almost work if you only wanted the lens axis to be horizontal. You can also mount the camera vertically, but then there's no way to position the camera along the lens axis, so it, too, will need a macro rail.
The best thing about this particular bracket is the rotator, but it only does steps of 15° and 24°, not what I need. I could use the 15° detent to get 30° steps by skipping every second one, but there's no way to get anything close to the 36° that I use for horizontal panoramas.
On 10 January 2013 I heard from Ed Horka, who pointed me at a review of this bracket. It does, indeed, come with the third rail, so it has everything that you might need except for flexible angles on the rotator:
Each of these rails has the advantage of being relatively cheap. They all require some work to work around the design issues, but I should be able to buy any of them, sell my Manfrotto and make money. What none of them have is a leveling base. I'll consider that issue separately after I've addressed the brackets.
| Saturday, 12 November 2011 | Diary entry |
Message in the German Olympus Forum today: somebody had found a new panorama bracket and wanted information about it. In principle it doesn't look bad:
But clearly it's missing something: the most obvious thing is that, like so many others, it only allows vertical mounting. There's also a video about it, from which I discover that the word “Owl” is pronounced “Ool”. Clearly the bird comes from Hamburg.
And then it dawned on me: there's no way to move the camera along the lens axis. You can only move it along a line (roughly) parallel to the base of the camera. There are two rotators: one is to turn the camera on a vertical axis through the nodal point. Not only does it not have click stops for spacing the rotation evenly: it doesn't even have a scale! Even the very cheapest equipment I've seen always has a scale.
The second rotator is under the camera, where you don't really need one—usually. In this case, though, it is needed. There's only one horizontal rail, the one that separates the two rotators. But the camera is positioned on the vertical rail, and it needs to be positioned so the nodal point is over the other rotator. So you need to turn the second rotator to position it in that direction.
That looks fiddly enough like that. But wait! It gets worse! The nodal point distances are measured along the lens axis. The rail is offset from that axis by an angle which you can conveniently measure with the scale on the rotator. Then you can calculate the distance along the lens axis: length along the rail multiplied by the sine of angle. I always wanted a use for a calculator with trigonometric functions.
So why have they done this? To save money? Hardly. The rotator is more expensive to build than a rail. And the unit isn't cheap: the only place I have found it for sale is here, where they want € 350 for it, currently US $ 480. That's more expensive than most, even the big names. About the only explanation I have is that they don't know what they're doing. They're not the first.
But then this company has another bracket, the MK Panohead, which makes much more sense. It doesn't have a rotator with click stops either, and it does have a second rotator for the more obvious purpose of rotating the camera about the horizontal axis through the sensor. Nobody seems to sell it; the only reference I have found to a price was at Nodal Ninja, where they give the price as $780. Clearly they're trying to show why their own offering is better, so the price is probably an upper limit, but their most expensive offering costs $350 and includes a rotator with click stops. No wonder nobody sells the MK.
The Owl has shown a deficiency in my list of criteria, however: I had never thought it could be that difficult to measure the distance along the focal plane. Time to write a new page (this one).
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