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Over the last few years SIRUI have become a manufacturer of force in the photographic industry. Like most photographers I originally viewed their equipment with a healthy dose of scepticism. Like many I believed that being a Chinese manufacturer they...
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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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Every adventure photographer living in South Africa dreams of going to remote locations where few people have ever been, in the search for something special, something to tick off the personal bucket list that you will forever remember. In November 2017 I was asked to join a group of veteran landscape photographers on a trip of a lifetime, a trip that might just be one of those legendary trips I dreamed of. We set out to plan a week long hiking and camping expedition to arguably the most impressive mountain range in Africa, the Drakensberg.
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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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