Nieuwe statiefkop!

From left to right my history of tripod head usage... First a Sirui ballhead K-30X, heavy and massive but eventually I didn't like working with it. Also quite irritating if you got sand on it or in cold weather. Then I read something on the internet about Acratech, an American brand. They got great reviews at DPReview, a site with reviews on photo gear. Unfortunately this brand is hard to find in Europe. Fortunately (also for my wallet) I found the middle ballhead, the Acratech GV2 on marktplaats.nl. Much better experience and quite handy for macro. Easy to clean because of the open construction and much better knobs to control the ballhead. Also much lighter than the Sirui. Which is nice when you go out hiking with your backpack and tripod. Still there were some things I wasn't really happy with when setting up a shot. Now, with my birthday coming up I bought myself an early birthday gift: not a bullhead but an Acratech Long Lens Head. Especially made for working with long lenses. While a ballhead makes it easier to angle your camera in all directions I found that with most of my shots I wanted the camera to be level. As the bubble level of nr. 2 was broken I found it still really hard to get my camera level. The new one has a bubble level on the bottom surface. When this head is level, your camera will be too. You can then angle your camera to front and back and still stay level. Also if you want to create panorama's you can turn the head and it will still be level. Something I found time-consuming with the ballheads. While researching an alternative for a bullhead, I stumbled upon a video on Youtube by Thomas Heaton (a UK photographer). He was apparently struggling with the same thing I was and recommended this head (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRFAwNx7QJY). I've tried out a bit with this head and I am super happy with my purchase! :-) Now you may ask "where did you get that head when they're very hard to find in Europe"? Well, again to my luck I found it also on marktplaats.nl. It was on there from January this year and fortunately it wasn't sold till now to me. I will still be using the ballhead from Acratech but for macro images, not for landscape photography.

If you're interested in Acratech gear, see: https://www.acratech.net, I certainly am happy I found their gear.

Want to look for information about all kinds of photography gear, check https://www.dpreview.com I found it very useful when I was researching information about lenses, camera's, ballheads and all things related.