- We've mentioned these multi row systems
but let's build one from the ground up.
Ron, why don't we start with this essential one
you have here that's pretty reasonably priced.
- Yes, this is a really great tripod head
that can take a fairly heavy camera,
an SLR with a good, solid lens.
We've got a rotator base that we'll talk about
a little bit more in a second, and then a horizontal plate
that just goes right onto the tripod.
- [Man In Green] Yep.
- [Ron] The usual way.
- And it's got a bubble level built in,
making it easy to check that things are level.
This doesn't actually have
leveling ability built in, does it?
- Not built in, we would wanna have a leveling base
of some sort here.
Next we add our vertical rail.
And this system just screws on.
And that's attached already to our camera mounting plate.
- And so now it's pretty simple to just take that
and attach, right?
- Take our Arca-Swiss bracket,
slides right on there and there is even a marking to show
where it's centered so that my lens is centered
along the rail.
- And so if we look at that there,
you see that that's giving us the ability.
And this one has those nice indents, right?
It's locking into place as we turn.
- The wonderful thing about this rotator,
it has quite a few options for use with different lenses.
So for instance, if we're using our example
of our 24 millimeter lens,
and we want to take nine images around
in order to cover our 360, we can make those settings here.
From 30 degrees, currently it's set at 60 degrees,
I can set it to take eight around at 45.
So again, that's gonna depend
on the focal length of your lens
but all the options are there.
- And this is nice, and now as it turns
you actually feel that little click and that sorta
snaps into place, which again, speeds up your confidence.
Now in order to get this in the right position,
you actually need to do a little bit of trickery, right?
We've mentioned the whole finger thing
but when you're shooting, describe what you look for
in the field as you're viewing through the lens.
- Well you can tell if you have a parallax problem
in the lens by doing a similar test
that we did with the finger,
which is by rotating the camera so that,
looking at some nearby detail such as a pole, a tree,
and a far away detail such as a building,
and if I look on the left side of my view finder
on my LCD screen, I would expect it to line up the same way
as on the other side of the LCD or view finder.
- So it's just a matter of, as you pan the camera,
making sure that the relationship between those two objects
stays preserved and if it doesn't,
which way are we gonna move the camera?
- A few different ways.
- Okay.
- There's a, I would say there's a easy
and a somewhat more difficult step.
First thing to do is tilt the camera
so it's pointing straight down at the tripod head.
And on this particular head there's a bolt
right in the middle and that's the rotation axis.
Some other tripod heads have the bubble level there
as a smart thing to do, other ones have
a kind of a target there and make it really obvious.
And from that, all we need to do is move this
from left to right in order to get it directly over.
In fact, since this camera's never been used
on this head before,
I can see that my other settings aren't going to work.
- And what's nice here is that we have
the articulating view finder, so I can actually just
tilt that up Ron, and see it, so I don't have to
actually stand on my tippy toes to look through.
- Yeah, this is a good test, John, of course,
before you're out shooting.
So normally when I do this I would just have the tripod
fairly low to the ground and I can just easily look in there
and make sure that it's even.
- Yeah, and it looks pretty good.
Now see when I turn this, I actually get
the manual focus setting and we could adjust it,
we need to go just a little bit that way.
- This one needs to go away.
- Yeah.
- This little plate is intended so that I can add it,
I can put it on after I found my correct settings
and then it's very easy just to reset
the same camera back on the same head.
- There we go, and if I turn that around,
it looks like we've punched in there
and it's pretty centered, so that's kinda nice.
I do like these articulating view finders
now that the mirrorless cameras are making
that sorta standard it's kinda nice because let's face it,
like, having to stand up on your tippy toes
or pull a camera case over to see that
so we've got it centered this way,
now we can go ahead and turn that back, right?
- Right.
We've actually done two settings so far because
I mentioned very quickly as I set the camera on
you set it to the center of this rail.
- Okay.
- So then the third step is the one
that takes a little bit of practice sometimes,
and that's when we mentioned before where,
I'm going to rotate one side,
I'm gonna rotate and look at my details,
my far away details and my close by details,
and try to get them to align
as I rotate to the other side of the view finder.
And the way I make that adjustment is
just by moving the camera forward and back.
So, you can see this tripod head and just loosen here,
and I can push forward and back.
- And it will take a little bit of trial and error
but with practice you can get this,
and what's great is once you've found it,
particularly if you're using a prime lens,
you can actually put a mark on the lens to sort of
make this a little easier, right?
- More on the tripod head.
You could do it on the lens, you would just, by doing it,
you'd be eyeballing it but you can make a,
you can either note the millimeter settings
that are marked on all,
almost all of these kinds of tripod heads
and this particular one comes with the little tool
that I just can screw in there so that it stays
for the next time and then I just
put this rail right back in the same position.
- All right, well let's detach that one.
I'll build one more here that's kind of similar
and then you've got a awesome feature to look for
as sort of an optional top of the line.
And here I've got another head from Really Right Stuff,
same general idea, I'll just detach that,
and this is giving me a solid tripod head.
Now what I like about this tripod head
is that it's got the degree marks right on it
so very much like yours there.
It doesn't have the same sort of indent philosophy, though,
which I do admit I like quite a bit.
So Ron's just gonna remove that.
There we go.
- [Ron] Almost.
- Yep.
It's great building gear but it always takes time to do
the conversion, this is why we pick gear and we like it.
All right, so there we go, drop that down.
- I pulled that job of removing it.
- And we'll just spin that down.
Get a solid platform.
Good, and now, once that's tight, I can actually adjust this
and use the bubble level to kinda get that level.
But because this system actually has its own built-in rail
with a level it's not as bad.
You'll notice that on the end here I've got a bubble level
which is great, I could attach that and the bubble level
at the end here is gonna make it easy to see.
We now take this piece,
which is very similar to what you had there,
and we just attach that,
and this has the ability, just like the other one there,
to sort of move in and out, right?
- [Ron] That's your vertical rail.
- That's gonna allow us to get there.
There's the vertical position.
And then we slip this on in.
Now, do you prefer for this level
to be on the top or the bottom, any preference?
- It's completely up to you,
I typically put it on the bottom to keep it out of the way.
- Okay, we'll just turn that down, open the jaws up there,
little easier for me to do it if I look at it,
that whole righty tighty lefty loosey backwards thing,
there we go and attach it in.
Now the whole idea here is that
we've moved the camera off the center
and so same idea, degrees, this is just a little bit more
heavy duty, could hold a heavier camera lens combination,
and we'll just take that and attach.
Now, you're saying at this point,
we could just use the regular bottom plate, right?
- You could, yes, that's normally the setting
so our camera's still in vertical portrait orientation.
- Okay, and in this case we just need to
move this in or out, same idea,
we would test it the way that Ron had previously suggested.
But let's just go in that as a general region.
Took your picture there.
(laughs)
And you can see the same general idea,
that we have the same flexibility.
Now why would we choose this over that?
Is it just a matter of personal preference
or sometimes you need a heavier rail?
- Well I think there's a,
some difference in the size of camera
that would be comfortable on this heavier duty system
but when I was showing is a heavy, pretty heavy duty
for most purposes but this one is kind of
kicking it up a notch.
There's another thing about this system
that I was actually just noticing
while you were putting it together.
We hadn't talked about this before is that,
there's a lot more flexibility with it.
I noticed the bubble level on this rotator,
showing me that this rotator
can be used as this kind of rotator.
- Yeah.
- [Ron] So there's, this is a bit of more flexible system.
- Yeah, and I've actually used this on other
types of projects because it's modular can be torn apart,
I've actually used this for shooting
different types of green screen video projects
and other things where I just need to be able
to control the camera's position.
I love having repeatable shots
with the degree marks in both cases.
And that allows you to be very specific.
We have degree marks here and here,
although you do have that on that system too.
- Is this system something you bought as a system
or was this something you put together?
- It's something I sort of built modually.
They do sell this as a kit
but I had some of these rails already,
so when I went to buy it I only had to buy two of the pieces
'cause I'd already bought the other stuff for another job
so when I'm not using it this way,
I can tear these pieces apart and use them
and we'll talk about just using a basic rail system
so sometimes when I wanna pack lighter,
I'll just bring this rail
and we'll actually explore that next,
but there is one more feature that you pointed out.
And sometimes when you're shooting a 360 photo,
you wanna make sure to actually shoot the floor.
And what's the thing that this particular unit has?
- Yeah, this has a Nadir adapter
and it isn't only for this unit, it's just that
that's what I have it attached to at the moment,
and this is another tripod head just like the others.
This was our GigaPan example but it's not
necessarily only for GigaPans.
This same unit is available without the GigaPan attachments
and the, a lot of times I'm asked,
"How do you capture the floor so that you have
"a 360 where you can look down and there's no tripod?"
- Yeah, 'cause if we were to turn this here
it'd be like, "Oh, great, there's a three,"
you know, I'm pointing at the ground, but oh, not so good.
- Tripod's always there.
- Now I could slide this guy over, right?
On this unit, like I'm not out of luck completely.
We can go there.
- This unit, that might be a nice solution.
We can still, what we're doing is we're,
the tripod is still there.
We're not trying to make it disappear exactly.
- Minimize it.
- Physically, but now we can move the entire tripod.
- Mm-hmm.
- And yes, our parallax is going to be
a bit of an issue, there are solutions
for that now in software
but we do still have the advantage of being able to capture
what's below the tripod and have the advantage
of have, the same solid tripod in case you're using
long exposures or bracketing, et cetera.
- But.
- So that's a nice solution and this one has a really,
kind of an elegant one as well
where the camera is now facing
you the viewer and I can rotate it.
- Very cool.
- Immediately.
Camera would be pointing straight down, avoiding the tripod.
- So as you see here, this is great for multi row shooting.
Now if you just wanna shoot single row, this solution
may be a bit of overkill but it absolutely works.
One of the nice things about it is it gives you
great flexibility to really use it
with any camera and lens combination.
So if you're a shooter like me who likes to shoot on Sony,
likes to shoot on Olympus, still owns Nikon,
has some Panasonic cameras, just ended up with a Fuji,
you get the idea, it's nice to be able to just
adapt the gear and shoot with the camera
that I want to for that particular project or job.
And these types of solutions really can work
with just about any combination, right?
- Right, they're all very flexible.
And even for people that aren't as lucky, as rich,
to have all of those options, a lot of us
that are either enthusiastic photographers
or doing different kinds of work professionally
still have a handful of different cameras as well,
and that flexibility can be really important.