A Good Tripod Head Is Essential

Ball heads are fast to set up and they supply great flexibility in positioning the camera. A ball mind can also work nicely for macro photos and product photography. When shooting landscapes, the levers on pan and tilt heads can assist support and position the lens whilst you're framing your image. Fine tuning forward-backward and sideways tilt is simpler moving just one axis at a time. The absolute greatest solution for precise framing is really a geared pan and tilt head.

A geared pan and tilt head like Bogen's 3275 (Manfrotto 410) enables you to set pan, and tilt in both directions, with a 'micrometer' screw handle adjustment. You just twist the appropriate knob and the digital camera rotates smoothly on that tilt or pan axis. This technique of adjusting pan and tilt is a lot more precise than trying to move the digital camera using levers that need to be loosened and tightened for every movement of the digital camera and lens. The Bogen 3275 does have a release on each axis for rough positioning. See a picture from the Manfrotto/Bogen 3275 geared pan tilt head with the two accessory micrometric plates.

Within the past I have used a pan tilt head at the zoo in a method comparable to utilizing a fluid head. If you level your tripod and side to side tilt axis, you can use a pan/tilt head a lot like a video fluid head. You end up utilizing forward and backward tilt and side to side pan to maintain your subject in your viewfinder as it moves about in it's enclosure. You can also use a ball mind in inside a similar fashion. If you are going to use a ball head to 'follow' a moving subject, it needs to have smooth movement plus a decent ball friction adjustment. Utilizing a ball head in this method is faster since you are able to have your hands on the digital camera in normal shooting position as you are moving the camera around and following your subject. This really is the technique I'm currently utilizing for most of my zoo photography.

I use my Bogen 3021 tripod and 308RC ball head a lot like a monopod. This combo along using the vibration reduction feature of my Nikon 70-200 lens enables for reliably sharp images at shutter speeds down to about 1/30 second at 200mm. At shutter speeds under 1/125 I try to fire the shutter during one of the brief moments that the animal is holding perfectly still. This technique requires some practice, patience and some luck.