Jim,
It's a wonderful composition. Darn shame about the banding. I can sympathize. BTDT; I know the feeling.
I'm especially impressed that it's only your second Cirkut shot. Wow!!!!!! I can't imagine having so much gap between attempts.... I'd forget everything I thought I learned each time if I waited that long.
I've done maybe 6 Cirkut shots now in 6 weeks on my new-to-me #10 Cirkut, and my learning curve has been very steep. Given all the variables that the photog has to get under control, I took the seller's advice, and did small pans first, to conserve film and really *learn*. I'll err, figure out what I did wrong, won't make that mistake again, but will go and find a new smaller mistake to make. I've had minor banding, made almost invisible by warming the camera up with a warmup lap before the real shot. Found the warmup lap cure accidentally when somebody in a group moved on the first try, and I had enough film for a reshoot, and the reshoot was silky smooth. I've had a single vertical dark strip toward the begining of several early negs, which at first I worked around by starting the camera well in advance of the subjects, but which now I think was the odometer detent spring causing drag before the Cirkut was really up to speed. Seems to be solved by my carefully tweaking the odometer counter detent spring, so it was just barely strong enough to do its job. I've had banding from having the drivegear-to-ringrear mesh too loose, and having it skip.... was just dumb luck that I happened to be watching the gears, and saw what I thought was 2-3 skips, and then found on the neg 3 dark bands where I thought the skipping had occurred. I'm confident that won't happen again, experience is a good teacher, but not necc. a fast teacher.
I'm fortunate in that the original lens came with my camera, so I didn't have to re-engineer anything, or re-calc gears ratios or anything else. And I've had good advice. The original seller told me what Ron said above, ie, that the horizontal focus is best at 25' and 50' and 100', and to work with those numbers for best results. So I avoided that pothole.... Being able to use the factory lens / factory focus & gear scales / factory gears has probably been a huge help for me. Something else I think was a big help, was having spent a couple years shooting with swing-lens cameras, sometimes splicing multiple swing-lens images together in Photoshop, to simulate a Cirkut pan long before I owned one.
I'm finally getting to the point where I feel confident that I can shoot a photo with the Cirkut, and capture what I expect to capture. But even so, for a shot where I absolutely must produce results, I keep the swept angle down to 120 degrees, and have my Kodak Panoram set up just behind the Cirkut, for a backup shot. The one group I've done so far, I didn't need the backup, but was sure glad to have it.
I'm shooting a large group this weekend at a motorcycle event, and will use the Panoram as a backup just a few feet behind the Cirkut (take the Cirkut shot, move the Cirkut away, and take 2 Panoram shots with the already set-up Panoram), but I also took a test shot with the Cirkut on Monday, to verify that all is well. Seems to be. Hopefully I won't learn any new mistakes this weekend.
Your eye for suitable subjects is excellent. And I'd be the last person in the world to say it's an easy thing to get up to speed on a Cirkut. Hang in there.
BTW, this is the foundry where your 22" camera was made. We were there to look for patterns in the wood pattern storage building that might say "Sheelor" on them. Time was limited, but it was fun to look.
