Gear Lust Running List

Photography. Yum
Gear Lust. Yum
Life as a guy, so be it.

This blog post will be a running list. Enjoy.

09/26/2010
1. Induro PHQ3

This part pano head (65%) part ball head (35%) has mucho potential. (You can buy it here from Amazon.) The best thing about this bad boy is the arms partially screw off, enabling it to be collapsible. Logistic solutions are so much more user friendly with collapsible arms.

The MAC representative, specifically representing Mayima medium format cameras, had one of these bad boys in his gear bag. I gotta say, this thing is pretty trick. Gee, I'm sure once I own one of these bad boys, my ability to awesome pictures improves, oh, hmm, say, 0.005%. This is not a cheap toy but I gotta say, I see owning of these bad boys in my future.



09/26/2010
2. Singh Ray Reserve Graduated Filter

I think it took way too long for someone to figure this one out. I was thinking about this last year when I was in SF shooting the coastline from Baker Beach at sunset with a standard graduated filter. The trick now is to see if the transition from dark to light is quick enough for most sunset scenes. I gotta say though, kudos to Singh Ray for coming up with this product. Photography related innovation is a lovely thing.

For those wondering what a reverse graduated filter is let me explain. The darkest portion of the filter sits right on the middle of the filter, in the center if you will, and lightens out. It is the reserve "placement of the grad" of a standard graduated filter. During sunset scenes, the sun, the brightest part of the scene, sits somewhere in the middle part of the frame and is generally unaffected by standard grad filteres.

Just a though, for scenes where HDR and bracketing doesn't make sense (and I've been way too dependent on multi shot/bracketing shooting practices), adding filters makes a boat load of sense. As an additional note, using filters removes the potential for multiple image motion blur artifacts.

Additional purchasing links can be found here.