THOUGHTS ON TRIPOD HEADS FOR WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY

today i thought i'd bite the bullet pull myself for coffee and get stuck in to what might just be the most boring topic in the world of wildlife photography and the reason is because so many of you have asked me in both emails and comments on the channel and in case you're not aware of what the most boring topic in wildlife photography is well it's camera support it's the tripod head and i'm going to take you through some of the models that i use in my day-to-day and show you some of their pros and some of their cons and how that led me to the choices that i've made so if you haven't grabbed yourself for coffee already go get one because the first tripod head on our list is one that you probably already own it's the humble ball head if you were to say to me that i could only ever have one tripod head for the rest of my photographic life i think the chances are i would choose a ball head and the reason for that is because not only is it relatively compact compared to the other tripod heads that i'm going to take you through in this video but also because of its sheer versatility i can use this from landscapes portraiture all the way through to wildlife photography and even bird in flight photography it's that versatile now i'm not saying it's a brilliant solution in every single one of those cases but at a push we can use it for any one of them i think most of us know that we can use a ball head to lock the camera in any position we like and take a picture of our subject and that's great for things like macro photography and landscapes and also some situations in wildlife let's say we've got a bird in a tree but the difficulty comes when we need to move the camera and track the subject in the field and the ball head actually gives us quite a bit of utility to be able to do that i can swing this camera through a range of motions very successfully because this ball articulates a great deal and that's great the difficulty i have though is i have to hold the camera either with my left hand here just to dampen the movement or at least with my right hand and if i let go of this camera what i get is a nasty situation called camera flop it flops down and worse than that if i was to rotate the camera and have it so that i could rotate it the flop gets worse if i was to swing through a movement and then go like this you can see it flops very very easily so i tend to have to use it with the tripod locked off the tripod collar locked off and not in a rotational mode and i risk particularly with larger gear let's say you've got a big 600 on here 600 heavy lens and you flop it you've got a risk to your equipment you might actually damage your equipment so we have to remember to lock off the head when we let go of the camera now a lot of ball heads like this kirk ball head have a friction adjustment here on the ball so i can actually adjust this friction adjustment and i can use that and i can still move the camera around and leave it without risk of flopping and that's great but it is extremely stiff and it's not as easy to track an animal moving so there's a couple of different ways that we can actually use a ball head to get around this issue now depending on the size of your ball head you'll be able to use it with larger equipment or medium-sized equipment with this one i'd say we're into medium-sized territory and you might notice in the ball head here there's a u-shaped cut out one of the ways i can use this camera more effectively for wildlife photography is to rotate it so that it can the the arm the friction arm of the ball head can go down into this u-shaped cut out and now i can use this thing in a panning axis and a tilting axis and you can see i've got a great deal of articulation in this camera i can follow and track movement so at a push i can use the ball head as an articulated mount for tracking wildlife the one downside with this method though is with larger equipment there's a lot of strain on the arm of the ball here and on the ball itself so you want to make sure you've got a decent sized ball head and the second issue is there's a rotational movement to this tripod setup so with heavy equipment on one side the tripod isn't spread widely enough and not stable enough you risk your gear toppling over and damaging it i apologize about the rain on the roof that's coming through on the audio unfortunately there's a cyclone hitting the coast of course and this is the third time i've tried to shoot this video and i'd say that this is probably the quietest it's been so if you hear any wind noise for any rainfall just think of it as ambience african ambience now you can see i've got this tripod set up on the table in front of me with the legs quite widely splayed i've got the ball head now mounted underneath it instead of on top of it and i've got the camera hanging off the ball head and that gives me all of the motion and utility of the ball that beautiful motion that i get from having a ball but the weightlessness of a gimbal that is fantastic the only limit i have is how far i can push my right shoulder under this leg but i can push it in quite a long way if you think about the way i'd use this probably lying down on the ground i'd be able to shoot out over a lake or a river in this direction and get a nice degree of movement and i can let go of the camera safely the only thing i'll warn you about is the fact that you need to clamp down the center pole quite aggressively to prevent any risk of your camera hitting the ground or the center pole falling out you can actually get an end cap that i haven't used here that you can screw into the end of the pole to make that impossible and then using the ball head in this way really does open up some possibilities and it doesn't really end there because once you flip the ball head you can probably think about how else you can use it if you think about a lot of hides out there they've often got a ledge or a lip at the top some of them in south africa at least have got an actual metal bar across the top and that facilitates the use of a clamp if i was to clamp this super clamp to that bar or that lip or that ledge i can screw my ball head into here and i can hang the camera down in this mode and shoot out the hide window so with those pieces of equipment i get a lot of the utility of a gimbal but only having to use a ball head now i think i'm probably going to get a lot of comments in the video about something called a wimberley sidekick and a number of manufacturers make different forms of this tool i don't happen to have one so i'll link out to some videos down below that do explain their use but a sidekick basically turns your ball head into a mini gimbal that you can pack easily and take with you anywhere let's talk gimbals i've got this camera mounted on a gimpro gear gimbal built like a sherman tank in south africa and the important thing to note about gimbals is they have a panning axis movement like this and a tilting axis movement like this and the reason they can deliver that so safely is because the pivot point here is above the height of the camera and the lens the above the the center of mass of the camera and the lens so the camera is able to hang weightlessly and freely from this gimbal now most gimbals have a degree of drag that you can apply to make that movement less frisky shall we say but you can articulate this camera in any movement any way that you want and track that wildlife or that bird flying erratically out in front of you which is fantastic that's great that's what we want the downsides to a gimbal though are its sheer size and weights i mean this thing is built as i said like a tank i could probably use it as a weapon if i wanted to and it's hard to pack it's really hard to pack if you think about taking a big lens with you packing this gimbal taking all this other stuff with you on a wildlife photography trip you're going to be taking up quite a lot of space in your camera bag now the other dish problem with it is the fact that you can't really use it as easily as a ball head for landscape photography so while it's great for wildlife especially moving wildlife photography it's not so great for landscapes now of course i can lock it down into various positions and take my shot that's not really a problem but i don't have when i've locked it down like this i don't have that side to side movement that you get with a ball head like this one so i can't level it up perfectly i might have to use the tripod legs or something like that and then if i decided to okay just change the orientation of this camera and mount it this way let's say on a an arca swiss plate on the body of the camera so now i can move it in this direction i then still can't move it up and down in a tilt so i lose one of the axes of movement when i use a gimbal head like this one and that's a little bit of a problem if you're also taking landscapes because you end up having to pack this as well so i typically take this and this with me when i'm photographing out in the bush one of the big downsides of the gimbal head comes when you try and shoot video with it as i do a lot naturally i shoot for youtube a lot of online content learning and educational content that you can see on my website it becomes a problem to use a gimbal head and i'm just going to illustrate why that is because of the extreme length of a telephoto lens you get an exaggerated movement any slight movement you make here is exaggerated in the scene that you're filming and if you're thinking about video there's nothing worse than jerky video so if i'm doing a panning shot like this there's just no way that i have the muscle control to get a beautifully smooth shot especially at lower frame rates which is all these cameras are really capable of and the same is true of any tilting movement as well and that's where video heads come in because of the fluid in the joints and the pivot points of those types of head you end up having resistance and that resistance allows you to get better panning and tilting shots so i have migrated generally away from gimbal heads and towards fluid heads for the bulk of my wildlife photography one of the first things to note about fluid heads is they only have two axes of movement i can tilt them in this direction and i can rotate them so they have that freedom of movement that we get with the ball head they have roughly the same movements as we have with a gimbal and that can be a problem for videos so a lot of video equipped tripods have a bowl underneath tripod heads also have a bowl underneath or you use something called a leveling head which you mount underneath the video head the fluid head and to whatever you're mounting it to now i don't typically have that much of an issue with this my pans are generally used with a telephoto lens so quite a tight field of view and it doesn't really hurt anything in my photography or my videography in terms of the leveling it up a bit because that view is so tight if you were to do a really wide view of a landscape or something you might end up with a wonky horizon in terms of movements i'm very very happy with the way this moves it moves exactly the same as a gimbal but you will note that the pivot point is actually underneath the device it's at the bottom of the device and it's below the weight of the camera and that as you know presents a problem but before we get into that there's another issue we need to explore and that's related to base plates or lens plates for some strange reason the base plate is different in a video head than it is to any of the other heads that we use this is an arca swiss head and this is a manfrotto 502 plate now we are lucky to some degree because the manfrotto 502 plate seems to have become a little bit of a norm in the fluid head industry and that means i can interchange this plate for instance with the benro plate of my other fluid head and you know use those those plates interchangeably thankfully because it is a bit of a pain in the butt so whenever i use the fluid head i actually need to take this ordinary arca plate off using an allen key and screw in a manfrotto video plate now i know the observant of you out there are going to tell me that you can get a clamp a lens clamp or plate clamp and actually put it on top of the video plate so that you can actually use this video plate with an arca swiss lens plate and the way that works is you you would put a a mount a clamping device very much like the clamp in the top of your ball head to this screw in the plate here and then simply attach your camera with its normal arc swiss plate to the top of this and clamp it shut very much the way the clamp works on a ball head unfortunately being in south africa a lot of these accessories these sort of accessories are vastly expensive here and that clamping device in south africa is over a hundred dollars and i refuse to pay that i just refuse because on amazon in the us you can get exactly the same plate perhaps a better one for 15 bucks even 12 bucks and i don't think that it's worth a hundred dollars so i don't use one now once it's mounted on the video head the fluid head there's a nice feature it's a locking feature and it's designed to stop your camera sliding off this thing there's a lock in the plate which you don't get with this kind of lens plate so that's a strong advantage in favor of a fluid head like this one i'd actually have to press this release here to remove the camera from the fluid head and that's why in some of my videos you can see me struggling a little bit in my excitement to get the camera mounted and onto the fluid head once it's on there and clamp down it basically balances a lot like a gimbal and i have that range of movement and utility at least as much as i do with a gimbal so it's fantastic i can basically move from a gimbal to a fluid head and get pretty much the same movement the only adjustment i don't have is in the vertical plane here and that's important for anything that's high up in the air when you're sitting in a vehicle or a hide not so much if you're standing because when you're standing you can move your head and your body around but when you're sitting in a vehicle you can't really do that you can't get too low here because the steering wheel's in the way or something's in the way so that vertical movement of the gimbal i'm talking about this clamp here allows me to move the camera up and down and that axis is missing from the fluid head that means anything that's high in the sky or at the top of a tree i can't necessarily shoot very easily with this fluid head because i can't get my eye physically down low enough to look up through the viewfinder so that's an issue that i've been battling with with a walk for a while but with the newer cameras like the r5 the mirrorless cameras anything basically with an articulating screen i can position the camera like this without contorting myself open up the screen look at the screen focus and take a picture like this so i don't really need that function that i used to have from the gimbal in this fluid head anymore and that means i can use this pretty much wherever i want whenever i want and get the same utility out of it as i do with a gimbal except for one crucial part and that is the pivot point being under the weight of the camera it can mean that when you're using this type of head with heavier equipment the camera becomes unbalanced and i can't actually um it'll it'll flop down like this and potentially damage your gear now the reason this manfrotto 502 is not flopping excessively is because i'm using a medium size and weight rig here and it's equipped with a spring counterbalance and that's basically giving me the ability to not have flop so that spring counter balance is pretty important in the manfrotto 502 it's fixed in the benro s8 that i also use it's actually got 10 degrees of control and that really really helps when i use the bigger 400 millimeter 3 kilo 3.8 kilo 400 millimeter lens on a head like this just because that pivot point becomes a problem so what are the advantages then of using this fluid head over a gimbal let's say well first off it's slightly more compact it's still pretty large and bulky but it's a little bit easier to pack but also the important thing for me is it has drag adjustments this here is a tilt drag adjustment and this here is a pan tilt a pan adjustment and when i tighten them up it becomes much more difficult to move the camera in this direction or in this direction there's a fluidity to them as the fluid moves through the joints and the pivot points and gives me a lovely smooth tilting motion or a lovely smooth panning motion that allows me to lock off the shots much better when i'm shooting video but i actually like that friction adjustment that drag adjustment in these these heads for when i'm tracking birds in flight i find that smoother more controlled movement actually yields sharper shots as well so if i want to lock this thing off it's also very easy to do i can lock off the uh the tilt adjustment there i can lock off the pan adjustment here and now the len the camera and lens is locked off and i can use it for stills photography bearing in mind that i don't have that sideways movement that i would necessarily have in the ball joint so it is limited in that respect but this this fluid head gives me a lot of the capabilities of the gimbal and the ball head rolled up into a head that can also deliver for video and that's typically why i use it because i produce so much video content at the moment now there's one final important caveat that i need to share with you about video heads because a lot of you i imagine are like me and shooting medium-sized camera bodies like the 7d mark ii and medium-sized lenses like this 100 to 400 or 150 to 600 and while there's no battery grip you can slide this thing forwards and backwards and balance it nicely on the fluid head but the minute i add a battery grip where this foot height is not high enough i end up with this problem i can't actually slide this thing and balance it any longer on a fluid head it doesn't allow me the gap here that's high enough to actually slide this thing forward enough to adjust it for the battery grip and if i release this this look hopefully you can see that there's no way i can actually physically balance this equipment even with the lens extended unless i managed to raise the height here and lift this battery pack above the base of the fluid head so that's a problem it's less of a problem where you've got a relatively high tripod foot for your lens and you can move it higher up and then you can probably slide it forwards and then typically on those lenses the weight of the elements out in front will allow you to balance it more easily as well so just bear that in mind if you are someone who shoots with a professional body like a 1d or a d series nikon or you're someone who has a battery grip for your normal size camera like the 7d mark ii you're going to struggle to get this thing to balance if you've made it this far in the video then clearly like me you're a little bit of a nerd let's face it that means you might like this video about reducing noise in camera and this video about teleconverters that is if you haven't seen them before please don't forget to give me a like and a comment down below if you did like this video because it really helps it get out there to the rest of youtube and if you'd like to support the channel please go and check out the wildlife toolkit i put a lot of work into it and i think it might help you possibly with your own photography it's linked down below i'll see you out there

Channel: Will Goodlet

Views: 18,514

Keywords: wildlife photography, bird photography, nature photography, tripod head, camera gear, wildlife photography tips, gimbal head, ball head, tripod heads, bird photography tips and tricks, video head for wildlife photography, video head for photography, fluid heads for still photography, fliud heads for, why i use fluid heads for still photography, using ball heads for wildlife photography

Id: aK9u8skL-LM

Length: 22min 29sec (1349 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021