In the previous post, I demonstrated my methodology for testing the moment of inertia (MOI) for a tripod.  Initially, we were trying to make the assumption that the inertial mass of the tripod was irrelevant towards calculating the damping time of a vibration.  The data in this post suggests that this is not the case, […]

Conventional wisdom has long been to use a cable release when shooting off of a tripod to eliminate any movement of the camera caused from physically pressing the shutter.  I agree with this wisdom, but needed to put it to a quantitative test. For this test, I placed the Fuji GFX and 120mm GF lens […]

As a tripod blog, we want to establish under what conditions a tripod is even necessary.  Conventional wisdom is that sharp images can be obtained in handheld shooting down to roughly 1/focal length in shutter speed.  I want to put that to the test using a high resolution camera, the best lenses, and a quantifiable […]

We have been focusing on the forces that wind pressure places on the camera, but wind is far from the only external force that acts on a camera.  In this post we are going to look at the amount of torque placed on the camera from handling the controls and pressing the shutter button.  We […]

Understanding how much torque is put onto cameras during shooting conditions is the last piece of the puzzle towards understanding how much tripod stiffness is necessary.  Previously we had looked at the amount of torque placed on the GFX cameras under real world wind conditions.  Those results were useful, but the variance in real world […]

I just completed testing on the the MeFoto Backpacker Air, which has the ignominious crown of worst tripod as rated under my ranking system.  Its not even close, the next worst tripod is by any reasonable metric at least three times better.  This makes the Backpacker Air a perfect candidate to test a conjecture I […]

The primary measure of tripod stability used on this site is stiffness, defined precisely as the amount of torque required to to achieve a particular angular deflection.  While we have very accurate measurements of the torsional stiffness of tripods, we don’t have good data on amount of torque that ends up getting exerted onto the […]

In the last post, I did not find any decrease in image sharpness when having stabilization turned on while on a tripod.  That was under perfectly still conditions though, using the most stable tripod I have and EFCS.  Here, I want to go to the opposite end of the spectrum, and test to see if […]