On Tuesday, April 8, 2003, at 04:41 AM, Brian Swale wrote:
This is why John Shaw in his Nature photography books recommends just a
very few tripods, all with the feature in common that you can splay
the legs
wide and get the tripod head very close to soil level, camera right
way up.
I have the Olympus macro stage and rack, but after reading what Shaw,
John
Johns and others (including Gary Reese) have said about vibration, I
try to
get close to the subject with only the bare tripod+head if I can.
Likewise, any
other form of extension that takes an SLR with flapping mirror,
shutter and
aperture shut-down mechanism away from the centre of stability ( the
tripod
apex) is likely to reduce vibration control. In my opinion. Lens
shutters as in
Koni-Omega etc are a different matter entirely.
Brian
I used to be of that school of thought and still am, at least if not
too extreme. I started changing my mind when I was shopping and looked
at a splayed out Benbo and saw how springy and unstable it was near the
ground with the legs splayed wide. It took a while before the head slap
came and I realized that any splayed tripod is basically not rigid
because they work because of forces along the legs and gravity is
working at almost right angles across the legs. I try not to use the
extension column either because of the spring pendulum effect, but it
may be the more rigid combined with a well deployed tripod.
There are never hard and fast rules. :-)
Winsor Crosby
Long Beach, California, USA
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