As a weekend warrior, I typically don’t let the weather dissuade me from going out. This cool January morning had scattered showers rolling through all morning. Fortunately, I was prepared, and had a great time shooting. This was my first time at this particular location, and the blue hour light and clouds with the wet streets did make for a cool, moody scene.
Sony A7R IV | Sony 24-70 GM | 25mm | ISO 100 | f/11 | 8.0 sec
Houston has a beautiful skyline, in my opinion. I really enjoyed this view with the tall skyscrapers surrounding the city hall, which was fortunately lit in blue to match the whole scene. Below is taken from the same perspective but I zoomed in to focus on the town hall with the skyscrapers providing a backdrop.
Sony A7R IV | Sony 24-70 GM | 43mm | ISO 100 | f/11 | 3.2 sec
The previous photos are a bit more typical view of downtown, but I moved to get a view of the northern skyscrapers. This was not as photogenic with this perspective.
Sony A7R IV | Sony 24-70 GM | 24mm | ISO 100 | f/11 | 3.2 sec
I just received my fourth tripod and third ball head. It’s my second tripod in as many months. Finding the right setup for my use has been an adventure. Like so many before me, my tripod journey started with a cheap tripod, then lead to an upgrade, then a serious upgrade, then the best fit, hopefully.
The Cheap Tripod
Cheap Tripod
The plastic and aluminum abomination you see here is what I started with. I was just starting, and to me a successful tripod was one that would hold the camera, and this tripod did that. I had issues with soft images. At first, I thought I was just struggling with focus. The whole plane of focus concept eluded me then. Turns out, in many cases, I got the focus correct, the image was just soft because of movement in the tripod. If I’m being honest, I was also using the center column which didn’t help. When I got back into photography, I knew I needed an upgrade.
Upgrade Tripod
3 Legged Thing Travis Tripod
Enter the 3 Legged Thing Travis tripod. This was from their punks lineup, which is their entry level line. When I was looking at the specs, though, it was the strongest (greatest amount of supported weight) for the price. I read reviews online and they were favorable, so I pulled the trigger.
This was a considerable upgrade from the aforementioned abomination of a tripod. It was significantly more stable, easier to adjust, and much better made. At the time, however, I was living in a coastal Florida town, and taking it out around the weather still yielded the soft results.
Research
I then started to try to find ways to weigh it down, but I didn’t pull the trigger on anything. I then turned to the internet to try to find a solution. I considered buying a new tripod, too. I started checking reviews for which tripod I should get. This is where the frustrations started mounting. All of the reviews I read and/or watched were just opinions, no one had anything concrete to contribute. I found most reviews favored brands, not specific products and that drove me crazy, too.
I then found Photography Online on YouTube. I just happened to stumble across a video where they were showing people how to use a tripod. I know that sounds trivial, but it was brilliant. This video is the first one I saw. In it, Marcus speaks about the sturdiness of the tripod and testing the sturdiness by putting your fingers on the camera and trying to wiggle it. I did this test on my Travis and even on solid ground there was way more movement then I would have like. They also have this video that you would enjoy when considering a tripod.
Serious Upgrade Tripod
I thoroughly enjoyed Photography Online so much I then began to watch their entire library on YouTube, and in many episodes Marcus touts how the Kingjoy Tripod is the best he’s ever used. He also specifically cites the expensive Gitzo’s he’s had that have broken. I tried to find the tripod state side, but was unable to, so I purchased through their online store.
Kingjoy A86
The first thing I did when it came in was set it up and try the two finger test. I know this isn’t definitive, but it was infinitely better than the 3 Legged Thing Travis. I felt complete, I had my serious carbon fiber tripod and it was sturdy. It also came with the tripod feet spikes. I took it out in the weather, and it was great.
Ball Heads
A new problem presented itself when I got my 100-400mm lens. At 400mm, even with everything tightened, I could see quite a bit of movement when interacting with the camera. I had the realization that my ball head was now the weakest link. Once again, the maddening and time-wasting research began. Things did not look good for my wallet when I found this website. The Center Column was everything I wanted. Their about us page spoke to me. David has applied a very scientific approach to the measurement and rating of tripods. Unfortunately, his last post was in 2021. Fortunately, he had completed a good number of reviews during the 3 years this was active.
I had seriously been considering the 3 Legged Thing Airhed, but after seeing the reviews on the center column, I realized 3 Legged Thing really didn’t make great products. In reviewing the results, it became apparent that the size of the ball had a direct impact on the sturdiness of the head.
Really Right Stuff was what I wanted. American company, American made, quality hardware. I thought about the BH-40, but they say for 400mm and greater, go 55. At this point, I was tired of purchasing and repurchasing equipment, so I was going to go big and be done. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to move the camera into portrait orientation, so I also needed a bracket.
Really Right Stuff talks about their arca-compatible standard, so I didn’t want any L-bracket, I wanted one that would fit nicely in the clamp style lock and keep the camera in place.
Best Fit Tripod
The only downside to my Kingjoy is the size. It’s fine for when I’m home and around town, but if I’m traveling, especially if I’m flying, I would not be able to take it with me. I really liked Really Right Stuff’s Ultralight line. With the fixed apex, it was much tighter fit. I wanted the three series to handle my gear, and fortunately, the TFC-34 mkII had a collapsed length of under 20” Not small, but manageable.
I have a few trips coming up, the tripod was out of stock on RRS’ site, but B&H had it, I decided to bite the bullet and buy it all now.
I took the new setup out this past weekend for a test run, and it was brilliant. The smaller tripod was much easier to wield around, it felt great, I had much less movement with my telephoto on. I am obligated to say, in regards to the RRS BH-55, it is built like a tank. Since that requirement is now satisfied, I’ll just add that the attention to detail, the feel, the movements, every aspect of this equipment is the best I’ve experienced.
I have been working with technology since before gigabit networks were standard. I remembered transferring files just to see how fast they would go. Today, with Thunderbolt, and 10 Gbps or 20 Gbps USB gigabit ethernet seems so slow. I’ve been holding off on upgrades because the cost versus benefit didn’t seem worth it to me.
Recently, I setup my custom rig, which has built-in 2.5 GE, and connected It to my modem that has a 5 GE port, and there was an improvement to speeds and responsiveness. Regrettably, I didn’t benchmark it, so I don’t have tangible figures to share.
At this point, I already had a Ubiquiti U6 Enterprise AP, and I was dying to see how upgrading that to a 2.5 GE would improve my experience. I upgraded my firewall, my NAS, and added the 8 port enterprise switch.
I am a bit annoyed at the moment. The new switch is no longer providing PoE. My WAP is back on GE PoE. Switching is otherwise functioning as expected. My new NAS is connected via 10GbE, and I have been transferring files to a from and very pleased with the faster speeds.
I have started the RMA process with Ubiquiti, and will make a new post when that process is complete, and will run some benchmarks on speeds when uplink via GE versus 2.5 GE.
Edit: Ubiquiti did respond to my RMA request next day, and approved it. Unfortunately, there isn’t an advanced replacement option that I can see, so I’ll be shipping it off.
I’m now on my fifth body. I started with the modest Olympus E-510. A 10 MP, 4/3rd system (Sensor & Mount). After a few years, I upgraded to the E-620, same 4/3rd system but with a 12 MP sensor and an upgraded AF system. I should have done some more research before that purchase though. I liked the higher resolution, but it was noisier.
Despite being a DSLR, the Olympus cameras were very small, as were the lenses and they were easy to carry about. I, however, started having issues with the AF system. I also found manual focus without focus assist to be difficult for far away subjects. These struggles and mounting frustrations led to me falling out of photography for a while.
After a few years, I was dying to get back into things, but I really wanted a new camera to address my frustrations. Pretty quickly, I was looking at mirrorless systems due to their EVF. I know for many photographers, the EVF is a travesty. For me, having focus assist in the EVF and that the image would change to match the set camera settings were very desirable.
After much research, thank you dpreview.com, I settled on the Sony a6400. It hit the right price, all of the features, and was well reviewed for photo quality. This is an APS-C sensor with the Sony E-mount for lenses. I had purchased this with the 16-55 kit lens, but shortly thereafter I purchased the 70-350 G lens. The kit lens was pretty soft, so I upgraded it to the 16-55 G lens.
After a few years, I was wanting to upgrade to Full-Frame, and I had a trip to Yosemite coming up, so I opted to pull the trigger. I first opted for the Sony A7 mark 4. This was brilliant, but the location assist annoyed me, and at the same time Sony had a massive discount on the camera I really wanted. The Sony A7R mark 4. I returned the a7 in favor of the a7R, and I was in heaven.
With the move to full frame, I needed to upgrade my lenses, too. I started with the 24-70 Sigma Art, and the 70-200 G lens. After a bit with them, I did return them and I upgraded to the 24-70 G Master (mark 1), and the 100-400 G Master.
I have been very happy with the results on these upgrades. I love the 61 MP images.
I’m fond of Synology in general. It is an affordable and capable solution. I wanted to start a website, and although there are a lot of affordable hosting companies out there, this wasn’t really something I wanted to spend extra money on.
I already had a Synology, and I knew they had web station, so I went to package center, and there was a WordPress package, along with MariaDB, PHPMyAdmin and PHP.
I installed all of the apps, and immediately I had a functioning site. I was excited and got to work. I have done a lot of web server management at work, and my first thing was check site health and see what it had to report. It noted that I was unable to check for updates, but everything else was showing okay.
I was content, and began to proceed. Next thing was installing some plug-ins. Two of the three plug-ins I wanted wouldn’t install because WordPress was too out of date.
Naturally, my next plan of action was to update WordPress. This was more challenging than I expected. I couldn’t update via WordPress, there were no app updates through the package center. I downloaded the latest copy from WordPress, SSH’d into the Synology and overwrote the WordPress files. That worked, kind of.
WordPress was no showing up to date, but I had to fix permissions on all of the files to get the site to work, Updates were still weren’t working the way WordPress intended, so I decided to abandon the built in package and try manually.
Using web station, I created a new site, created a database manually, copied the WordPress files. It took a lot of persuasion, but I was able to get WordPress running as expected without the built-in apps. I’ll dive into more details later, but if you’re frustrated with Synology’s built-in WordPress option, you are right to be so. Don’t do that, set it up manually in Web Station.