Trying out a New Toy

So, after much pondering and considering, I went on eBay and purchased new accessory for my tripod. I bought a geared tripod head. I don't expect most you know exactly what that is, although I'm sure you have a good guess based on the name.



The most common head, the piece that connects the camera to the leggy part of the tripod, is a ball head. It has a camera mounting plate connected to a ball that can swivel in any direction. Good for pointing your camera any which way, but bad when you want to move just a little in one direction, not all of them at once. I abandoned this type of head some time ago.

The most basic part of my tripod head is the leveling base. This is a kind of a ball head that has limited movement of 10 or 15 degrees and allows you to easily level the top of the platform so you don't have to mess with leg adjustments for 30 minutes to get the camera platform set. I have one of these.

In place of the ball head, the Acratech Long Lens head is what I've been using. This will tilt the camera forward and back and rotate from left and right. With the top of the tripod level, this is all you need. And since the two motions are now independent, you avoid all the wibbly-wobbly motion of the loosened ball head and can just move the camera in the direction you want. Easy-peasy.

Until you try to make small adjustments with a heavy camera, that is. Then you get a system that creeps a bit once you lock it down and your carefully choose composition gets cut off at the top.

This is where the geared head comes in. This is a three axis adjustment that moves by gears turned by knobs. With the leveling head, I can still ignore one of the three knobs and have very fine control over the others other to point and elevate the camera. No more creep since it is always essentially in a locked state.

Today's photos are a shakedown cruise with this new head. I ventured out to the front yard to frame up some flowers to get them positioned in the image just as I wanted. This means, for example, that the second image above has just the tips of the flowers cut off at the edge of the photo at both the top and bottom, not most of one flower or the other missing or me having to fight the Acratech head to get this camera to finally settle where I really want it.

This will be a good addition to my (already quite heavy) camera bag for landscape photos. I doubt I'll take both tripod heads when we travel again, at least by plane. However, when we hit the road and I can chuck it in the back of the car, you bet I'll take it. And any trip where landscape photography is likely be common (not Europe, but likely Australia or New Zealand).

There. More information than you care to know about affixing a camera to a tripod. Who knew it would be so complicated?