Little, little; little, little

Little, little; little, little

The title comes from the marvellous Terris, whose place a bit south of Rhodes airport we’ve visited several times over four visits to the island. And it perfectly describes my new gadget, a Benro geared tripod head. It’s a delight, and if you’ve ever tried setting up a precisely framed picture with a ball and socket head, you’ll appreciate it!

Now, a ball and socket head allows great freedom of movement of a camera, and you can adjust up and down and left and right (not to mention round and round) at the same time: a pan and tilt head allows you to lock two of these and adjust one of them on its own, for greater finesse. However, both suffer from what you might call ‘settle’ – you align the camera, lock the head again, and it droops a little.




A geared head works slightly differently. Instead of the locking mechanism being something you adjust manually, and can leave locked or unlocked, the default position is locked, but with a micrometer-like adjustment available all the time. This allows you to adjust by fine degrees, one plane at a time. The very first time you try it, it’s a delight, and the joy keeps building. A geared head brings the same finesse to camera angle as a focus rail provides for moving a camera backwards and forwards (instead of adjusting the focus of the lens).

There’s a penalty, of course: there’s the fine adjustment screw mechanism in each handle of the head, and it’s not the sort of thing that can be made from lightweight plastic. Therefore all geared tripod heads are relatively chunky, metal devices, and cost as much as many tripods. But the precision of using one is wonderful, a source of pleasure in itself. It took me a while to realise that I could still release the head for free travel by twisting the star-like rings and releasing the lock, and that the fine adjustment with the knob behind each release could be step two.