The money train continues! My folks were kind enough to pick me up a more stable tripod this Christmas. The first tripod I purchased was aimed at lightness of weight and fleetness of foot as we planned our trip to Alaska and beyond. Of course I immediately threw on the heaviest geared head you can find, but at least the legs themselves are light!

God, this ancient keyboard is dying.

Anyway, the tripod was light but that also means it’s not especially stable for anything other than static shots. I can sort of weigh it down by hanging things from the hook they built into it but it’s more to keep it from toppling over. It’s very apparent though when I’m taking video with it that I’ve touched anything anywhere during the filming process. The geared head isn’t great at following subjects either. In fact, it’s terrible at that. Most of the video I’ve taken so far has either been wobbly hand held or static on the tripod. My Lupin video is a good example of static tripod shots, although I did try to move it around a little to poor effect. You can see the camera wobble every time I interacted with it.

So I planned eventually to get a fluid video head but I didn’t really have the platform for it. This new tripod isn’t even technically a video tripod, but I thought it would do nicely based on some things I read. Typically video tripods start to get the webbing at the bottom to connect the legs, and the legs themselves starts to get more elaborate. Like this;

While this new tripod isn’t that, I still went ahead and purchased myself the fluid head that I rambled about last year – happy to find out that it was reduced in price with an additional rebate.

In my first ever test this afternoon it seems like the tripod legs themselves are quite stable. It’s hard to judge these things online and I haven’t got any place I can go test this stuff out in person. Relying on reviews can be difficult. Here’s a short bit of terrible film from the test;

I’ve got at least this camera and lens combination fairly well balanced, meaning when my hands are off the controls it will sit there where I left it even without everything clamped down. With the 70-200mm lens I’ll have to do some more adjustments to find the same sweet spot. It will take some practice to learn how to make my movements less jerky. They way the head works is by providing resistance to your movements via friction, which you can adjust. The resistance allows for smoother motion but as I’ve never tried it before I’m not very good at it.

As per usual, I need to get out more with my ever growing cavalcade of equipment. I feel like I’m nearing completion on what is a pretty well rounded piece of kit though. I would like a more effective way of keeping the camera steady when it’s off tripods, and the 2x extender to increase my focal range would also be nice. It’s a little embarrassing to have all this stuff and not use it as much as I can, although it does make the times when I do go out more enjoyable for me. As some might point out, you can have fun with almost nothing and improvise ways of doing things without the proper equipment, but part of it for me is the gear.