Approaching the Scene 077: Epic Fluid Head Upgrade + Better Panoramas (4K)

today I'm going to show you how this cool new piece of gear from Kirk is gonna make your life easier as an advanced panorama photographer and also really completes the ultimate lightweight fluid head setup in my opinion well hey everyone its Hudson welcome to approaching the scene I want to thank everyone who's been subscribing liking sharing the videos with your friends the channels really been growing over this holiday season and it's really been a wonderful New Year's gift to me to just see the community growing and this whole thing is about community and conversation so please lend your voice in the comments ask me questions in the comments just hit me via email I'm easy to get you know the conversation goes nowhere if your voice isn't part of it so this contents driven as much by you as it is by me so again I'm here in Portland Oregon gearing up for everything and I've been waiting for this part to come it's something I've been collaborating with with Kirk Enterprise Solutions Jeff Kurr cat Kirk Enterprise Solutions on for a little while and it's here and it's perfect and I'm super excited to share it with you now I'm going to show you some some fun bits of gear today some can either adapt what you've already got to get this functionality or this whole thing and I'm gonna put links in the video description so if you just go up to the top of the video click that show more and there'll be links to all this stuff so don't don't worry too much about finding it it's all right there along with gear links to everything that I use my whole kits link there so all right let me talk about what this is and I'll kind of give you the evolution here so anybody that knows me knows that I love fluid head so I'm just not a fan of using ball heads for still photography or really for for much of anything because the minute you go to reposition if you want to shift a little left up or down you lose level and with the fluid head you can both do wonderful video and hybrids shooting but you can also just recompose without losing level you get set up and it's just easy to shift a little bit or tilt a little bit I've got plenty of videos and still on fluid heads for still photography if you haven't read that before or just search my channel and you'll see plenty on fluid heads but the 500a hmmm Frodo to me is kind of the perfect fluid head for those of us using DSLRs or mirrorless cameras for still photography maybe a little light videography it holds just fine for me even using my five hundred lens sort of gimbal style it it hold it has a nice motion it doesn't have a lot of adjustability but it's lightweight it weighs exactly the same as a really right stuff pH 55 head and Kirk Enterprise Solutions has kind of noticed what a great head this is to now in just all you know making sure that I give you guys all notice I'm a Kirk enterprise solutions ambassador not because they pay me money but because I absolutely love their products and I think they're great people and I can't say that about every big support company out there that makes great stuff so I really like the people at Kirk they're really sweet people and they make great stuff and they listen so one thing Jeff Kirk did that I think was just awesome was designed a new bridge a new top for the Manfrotto 500 H that both saves weight and it puts this rotating nice big easy to use Kirk clamp right on top of the head and I originally took one look at it and I thought and it also puts it so that it's centered directly over the axis of rotation of your fluid head so the center of this the center marker on that is right over the center of rotation of your fluid head which is wonderful for panoramic purposes because this thing's a little asymmetric it's tough to figure that out exactly and you know I had for a long time been using these lr p1 panorama nodal sliders from Kirk enterprise solutions it's a really nice slider and like the clamp on the top of this head one of the cool things about it is that you can just pull its integrated allen key out turn this little allen in the middle of it loose and spin this thing 90 degrees so you can mount your long plated lens you sort of mount your camera however you want so it rotates it's got a little square fitting underneath that lets you lock this thing in either orientation which is great same thing on this on the top of the head so I took one look at this and I thought wow you know for 4 panoramas and forgetting your camera back so there's absolutely no flop with the fluid head you mount this lrp one on this new system you get your balance right and you can see you can just move this thing around maybe I'm a little forward heavy this is my my older D 850 which I'm about to get rid of with my 14 to 24 millimeter 2.8 lens on it you can see the other great thing about it is because it spins right over the axis of rotation this thing's perfect for advanced panoramas where you need to get your nodal point exact in order to avoid parallax and if that all sounds like mumbo-jumbo or gibberish I have a free video about finding the nodal or the no parallax point for your lenses that you can download I'll put a link to that and there's a whole course on advanced panoramas and why you might want to know about that so this thing really made the head more functional to me it gives you more leeway to sort of get get pulled back over the ax over the nodal point with less gear you don't need a panning clamp anymore the head works as you're panning clamps it's a Pan's level and it lets you get adjusted right over that no nodal point now the problem came when I first got my nikon z6 and i got the new 14 to 30 millimeter lens because i went ahead and hooked that up on here I'm just gonna put the 850 down I put that on here this is you know the equivalent focal length goes a little bit longer but you can see right off the bat here this lrp one sticks out well beyond the front edge of this lens so even at 20 millimetres even at 24 millimetres you can see the nodal rail in the image so it's in the way in every single panorama shot that you'd like to take and you can't use this to get the camera balanced because it's just it's in the frame it's too long so I talked to Jeff about that and he was responsive he built a really cool thing so he built the LR p2 which is a much shorter nodal slider yeah you know there's other companies making short nodal sliders and long nodal sliders it's great the only problem you know if you're taking multiple optics out there and you've got you know say a 70 to 200 lens and you want to shoot a piano and you need to get way back well this may not give you enough length for the of a slider for a new parallax slider to get to the new parallax point it's short it works great for short lenses like this some short wide-angle Prime's or normal lenses on mirrorless where you don't have that mirror box and you've got a shorter flange distance but it isn't necessarily the one nodal slide to rule them all and if you're caring lots of different gear on a big trip say to Patagonia do you want to have to take two nodal sliders with you and have two nodal sliders in your backpack it's not that they're heavy but they're expensive and they're not they're not insignificant in weight so I talked to him I started thinking about it and I said you know what if there were a nodal slider where you could adjust where did I set it my new toy put it down I'm like oh there it is I put it in my tripod stone bag you could adjust where the clamp is on the note parallax slider see so this is the lrp three and it essentially lets you slide that clamp you can also still rotate it it's got the integrated Allen and I can loosen this up and rotate it 90 degrees to set a long lens with the foot in there but it's got it's really well designed I asked for a few other things too I asked for it to have a marker on the slide where you could easily see how many millimeters there's a great gauge along here in millimeters you know where you're adjusting this to you so you can you can do your no parallax measurements and just note where your slider is set for its clamp and then note where your slider is set on the head it's two numbers to note now instead of one but it lets you work with one nodal slider for short lenses for long lenses it's just really really handy and we also put I asked for a little bit bigger bubble level and Kirk puts such a nice big easy-to-read bubble level on the end of it and calibrated the markings on both left and right and there's markings on the top so that you can look straight down on it so there's three sets of millimeter markings they they're marked at centimeters and millimeters and it's really easy to read I can even see it without my reading glasses and it's got a nice little mark for where you set it and then another one here whether you're looking straight down or whether you're looking at it from the side you can read those markings and just as an added bonus he few threw in a QT connector which is something I may be talking about in weeks ahead it's just a simple way I love luma has a strap or it has a QT you just plug it into the socket click it's locked they've got him in the new L brackets for Kirk - I'll talk about at all in in a subsequent video but push a button you're disconnected clicking in locked for your strap for your sling strap and you know other accessories so kind of future proof to the fact that this has that all built in you know one other thing I'll talk about that's really really cool is that for those of you who bought an older Kirk nodal slider one of the thing I love about this company they don't leave people behind and say we'll just buy the new one they've got this thing dialed where you can just you take this off now how I showed you you can rotate it so that you've got different orientations we can also take it apart and they sell this little piece separately which is the qrc 15 q don't worry I'll put a link to this and it's essentially that middle piece and the new lrp 3 and so you can take this guy drop it on your old lrp one or two the one makes more sense since the two is kind of short and all of a sudden you get that same awesome functionality it's got to get the bolt lined up here there it is dial that guy in and now your old lrp one suddenly does all the same sliding as the new lrp three there's a little less finger room it doesn't have the big is big a bubble level up front I'll put this on backwards but it still has the little gauge where you can read where it is on the side so you know you don't have to buy the whole new thing if you already have one of the nicer old ones they've got just a little piece that you can buy that goes in the middle to convert it which i think is a nice nod to their current customer base one other thing I'll talk about that's really cool with this the fact that we can pull this loosen this screw turn it this way and drop it back down makes it so that if I'm using a really long lens and I'm kind of going gimbal style like I've talked about you know I could in the past what I've done is connected a long rail to the stock foot this is my 500 PF my my absolute favorite long lens right now it's lightweight you can handhold it but when you are working on the tripod you know I've done in the past you just pull this whole assembly and replace the rail with a longer rail to get balanced over it well with this new lrp 3 I can set up here and this thing is just bomb-proof solid you have no play and all of a sudden that gives me more leeway with the foot this is actually Kirk's foot for either the Nikon 70 to 200 FLL edie or the 500 PF it's a really really nice piece it's called the lp64 it also has a QD connector so that you can connect that QD from the strap I was talking about and what it allows you to do is you know let's let's get here where we're set up I'm actually further back than I want to be I can slide this a little bit forward slide this guy a little bit forward but let's say we were using something like an 800 it still lets you get right where you want to be to get balanced it gives you a little bit more leeway to do that should you need to and now all of a sudden you can use this gimbal style to track birds and flight or sports action or an airshow you know whatever it is that you want you loosen up your your your fluid head and all of a sudden you can track gimbal style so it's some really really cool stuff fun things I have a bunch of new stuff coming up in the weeks ahead to talk about that I'm really excited about I'm actually taking the family skiing tomorrow I'm just gonna take the little new Nikon z50 with its 16 250 pancake lens on it and I'll be reviewing that camera pretty soon let's just say that we're keeping it as a family it's such a fun little tiny high quality camera has a lot of the features of the Z camera is not obviously all of them but I'll talk about that in a little bit we're gonna do some stuff on calibration whether it's calibrating auto focus on lenses or your monitor for printing there's gonna be a whole bunch of fun stuff coming and again I've got workshops coming up on kawaii next month and in Costa Rica and in Cuba there's still a few slots for the second Cuba workshop we sold out the first one so fast we added a second one I'll put links to those in the video description too so thanks everybody for watching I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday full of great food and fun times with family I sure did we'll see you next week

Channel: Hudson Henry Photography

Views: 13,814

Rating: 4.9378643 out of 5

Keywords: Nikon, Z7, Z6, mirrorless, lesson, education, training, how to, gear, photography class, digital photography, depth of field, f5.6, aperture, live view, Approaching The Scene, Hudson Henry, D850, 500 PF, Kirk, Kirk Enterprise Solutions, Nodal Point, No Parallax Point, Panorama, fluid head, entrance pupil, LRP-1, LRP-3, LP-64, QRC-15Q, MVH500-BQRV2, lens foot, Manfrotto, 500AH, replacement bridge, DSLR

Id: gYzVzjEa9WE

Length: 14min 28sec (868 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 09 2020