I wrote a post a couple of months ago about some problems that I was having with my tripod, specifically that the ballhead was drifting during long exposures. I parked the idea of trying to add a proper head to the existing legs after messing around unsuccessfully with various random bolts and attachments, and accepted the fact that I’d have to put up with it.

That was until a couple of weeks ago when we had a day trip to Ely. I was taking some pictures inside the cathedral with my 24-105mm lens and had to scrap every shot. It’s just to heavy for the integrated plastic ballhead, and the drifting problem returned in force. I also over-tightened the clamp out of pure frustration, and damaged the thread. I decided to take the plunge and ordered up a Manfrotto 486RC2 ballhead from Amazon. I’ve figured out a much simpler way of lashing it to the legs, as per the photo. One slight problem is that the only bolts that I’ve been able to find for sale are metric, whereas the head has an imperial-measure diameter. I’ve used some PTFE tape to bring the M8 bolt that I’ve used up a fraction, which is a pretty solid but non-permanent solution. In the meantime I’ve tracked down a contact back home [Ireland] who should be able to get me what I need.

Manfrotto head and National Geographic legs

…make you a semi-pro? I’m going to suggest that the answer to that question – being a little tongue-in-cheek here 🙂 – is a resounding ‘yes’ as I hit another milestone last week with the sale of my first ever stock image. I earned pennies for it, but was still pretty pleased….

This is a shot of our cat Ping who will happily accept modelling assignments for meat-based treats. Unfortunately our garden is a bit unkempt at the moment: I actively chose the wall as the best background on offer, so you can draw your own conclusions.

Anyway, I was experimenting with my ultrawide lens at minimum focus when Ping decided to grab the camera:

1/120sec at f20, ISO 640 at 11mm

Going as wide as this lens can [8mm] was losing too much of the subject matter to the [untidy!] periphery, and I couldn’t get close enough to Ping to remove this. As it was, this was – well, arms length for a cat. I tried using extension rings that I’ve written about previously: I’d picked up a tip from TWIP which overcomes the problems with the contactless extender, where the lens defaults to wide open: you set the aperture you want with the lens attached normally to the camera, hold down the depth of field preview button and, with the button still down, switch off the camera. You then attach the lens via the extender and the aperture is preserved. I have to admit I was pretty nervous doing this [and no liability accepted if you break something doing it!].

Shame the extenders don’t work with EFS: they fit fine, it’s just not possible to achieve focus, no doubt because of the different distance of the back element compared to EF glass.