Several months ago I reported to the list regarding my purchase of a Bogen
Swivel Tilt Head (3232). I had to get an adapter for a different screw size on
my Cullmann Magic 2.
While this head served its purpose of holding the vertical camera position well
for my shooting of our church tower for the front cover of our yet-to-be
published picture church directory, I have found a few problems with this. The
Swivel Tilt Head only allows one axis movement. It is time consuming to pan the
camera position horizontally.
The other problem I had is the lack of a quick release. I could have purchased
one, but I was changing the head back to the ball head that came with my Magic
2. This involved removing the adapter, which was not possible without a tool I
did not even own. During my Scotland trip, I wanted to switch back from the
Bogen head to the Magic 2 ball head. Since I could not manually remove this
adapter, I ended up spending one morning in Inverness trying to locate a
hardware store where I was able to get help (the hotel we were staying tried to
help me, but could not). I did buy a tool at a camping-good store to use for
the task of this removal in case I would need to do this again.
When I set up my OM-4T on the ball head on the Magic 2 for a group
shot of the choir, instead of using the self-timer on the 4T, I took advantage
of the husband of a good friend of mine in the choir. Since he is not a singer
and has done considerable SLR shooting in the past, I asked him to take three
shots for us as I wanted to get into the picture myself. When I got my camera
back on the tripod, I noticed the camera position was changed. Indeed when I
got my film developed, there were slight differences in the frames between
shots. I knew I needed to have a more solid ball head for my tripod.
IMO, the OM-system cameras are light enough not to need expensive ball heads
such as Arca-Swiss which offers load capacity ranging from 90 lb. to 150 lb.
(40kg to 68kg). Perusing the B&H Professional Photo Source Book and consulting
the Usenet postings through Deja News, I decided on a small professional ball
head from Kaiser. You can tell from the name that it is German-made and it
turned out to be a right fit for my Magic 2 which is also German-made. I also
got a small quick release for it at the same time. This ball head comes with
separate locking knobs, one for ball and the other for pan. The base has a 360
degree scale.
I tried out the new ball head on my Magic 2. My Kaiser ball head did not come
with a tripod-screw adapter which is supposed to be included, but with the Magic
2, it does not require this adapter since the screw size is 3/8". Another
surprise was that the camera plate from the Magic 2 fits right into the Small
Quick Release from Kaiser. Either it is a standard size in Germany or the
camera plates for Kaiser and Cullmann are being made by the same company.
With the OM-4T with a 135mm/3.5 on a Kenko 2X teleconverter MC7, the ball head
solidly supports the camera in its vertical position and tilted forward in the
horizontal position. The maximum load capacity of this ball head is 10 lb.. or
4.5kg. I think this would cover most of the needs of my OM system.
I weighed the new ball head and the quick release, which turned out to be about
400g. Since my old ball head including the quick release weighs about 300g, I
won't be carrying too much more weight. Although I can hand-hold the camera
down to 1/15 sec with an appropriate lens, using the tripod definitely has
helped my photography. Using the Magic 2, I don't have to carry too much weight
into the field, either. The Magic 2 only weighs about 1.3kg.
I don't know how much this Kaiser ball head costs elsewhere, but I bought the
ball
head for $69.95 and the quick release for $27.50 from B&H.
Tomoko Yamamoto
mailto:tomokoy@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.charm.net/~tomokoy/
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