Camera support for video

For photography I have three different tripods for different purposes. The smallest one is a GorillaPod that holds a compact system camera with a big zoom, but not much else. It can be wrapped around branches and narrow tree trunks, which makes it quite versatile. The next one is a small Slik Sprint Mini II GM, which is stable when extended up to 1 meter, but not much more. I've used it quite a lot, and this is the one I bring when going out for a bike ride. Trying to attach some sort of pan head would be too much, though. My big tripod is an ancient Manfrotto 055C with a Slik Pro Ballhead 800. This combination is much too big and heavy to be transported any longer distances with a bike or by foot.

For videography I'm considering a panning head, though I don't know which one yet. It would also be used with the bird spotting scope, which I have used with the Ballhead 800 for now. The panning head would have to be light (and not too expensive), since I don't plan to use any heavy equipment with it. A long term purchase would also be a new big tripod, which in practice would have to be of carbon fibre to be light enough for me. I doubt that I can afford it soon, though.

For video shots not taken on a tripod I bought the CamCaddie, but it turned out to be a small disappointment for me. It didn't provide any additional stability over my monopod, a Slik Monopod 350 EX, while being a lot less versatile. For the most part the video below is filmed with the camera on a monopod (no image stabilization) with only a few static parts on a tripod:


I think this monopod technique is very usable and with some practice I should also get better at it.

Night sky

I decided to figure out how to take pictures of the night sky with the Olympus E-P2. My last attempt was not entirely successful, due to focusing problems. The contrast detection autofocus does naturally not work against stars (nor would phase detection autofocus). Some quick experiments showed that manual focus works well against brighter stars, though. In manual focus mode it is very easy to activate the 10x magnification mode and fine tune the focus.

20 mm (40 mm equivalent) f1.7, ISO 400 and 10 s.


100 percent crop from the picture above for pixel peeping. The pine branch is unsharp because of the short DOF.


9 mm (18 mm equivalent), f4, ISO 400 and 25 s.


The great lamp in the night sky. 100 percent crop from a picture taken at 150 mm (300 mm equivalent) focal length.


The star sky pictures are not a detailed as they could be. I live at the outskirt of a large (for Finland) city and have a nice forest area just out my back yeard, but there is some amount of light pollution from the city. This time most of the stray light probably came from the full moon, though. There was some fog, which probably did not extent far up from the ground, and the moon lit up this layer.