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Two years ago I was lent the enormous SIRUI R-5241XL tripod to use in Namibia and subsequently review. I admitted in the conclusion that I had fallen in love with what I had dubbed “The Beast”. If there was one problem with the R-5241XL it was the sheer physical size of it. Every other aspect of the tripod was essentially an upgraded and improved version of the other carbon fibre tripods that are made by SIRUI. Now SIRUI have brought out the significantly smaller R-2214X tripod, which in theory takes all of the goodness that is the R-5214XL and squeezes it into a smaller and lighter package. In terms of competitors it is theoretically most similar to, as Hougaard Malan from landscapegear.co.za claims, compete directly with the more expensive and perennially popular Gitzo GT3543LS.
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Emil von Maltitz was one of the first people to take the dive on Laowa’s 12mm Wide Angle lens when they first launched on Kickstarter. We only started distributing Laowa in South Africa recently – his review is thus entirely objective. For the past year and a half he has used the lens all over Africa for a variety of genres including industrial, agricultural and landscape work and has put it through it’s paces. What makes this lens unique is that it is the widest rectilinear f/2.8 lens and also the only full-frame lens wider than 16mm that accepts a 100mm filter system. Not only that, but it’s priced at a fraction of the Nikon and Canon counterparts, yet beats them in almost every image quality criteria.
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A few months ago, Durban based photographer Emil von Maltitz acquired a drone from us. Most people buying up DJI’s hi-tech toys are using them exactly for that purpose and not much more – to play around and check out life from above. For photographers, however, it’s a bit more complicated than that and we all ask the same set of questions about image quality, ease of use and legality. In this review, Emil answers a lot of those questions and explains the complications of drone use as it applies to our species (photographers).
Choosing a tripod can be quite a difficult decision. We want stability, light weight, low price and large size pretty much as an ultimate goal when selecting a set of tripod legs. The problem is that we rarely get more than two of those options ticked off. So we have to make a compromise. Good tripods essentially manage to tick off three of those four. Great tripods tick all four boxes with the large caveat that one of those criteria are in relation to its peers (for example ‘well priced’ in relation to its competition does not mean cheap). Aluminium tripods are an attempt to get the most bang for buck out of a tripod, but they come with the hefty (excuse the pun) drawback of increased weight.
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In the past panoramic images could be quite tricky to get right. The software that was available tended to be rudimentary at best, and the hardware expensive and difficult to use. For the past few years though professional quality panoramic images have been very easy to create. Adobe’s Lightroom even has a fairly robust ‘merge to panorama’ feature included (although this is just a simplified version of Photoshop CC’s ‘merge to panorama). It really does mean that creating large format stitched panoramics is as simple pressing a button.
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