Howdy folks,
I was recently talking to one of the members at the Geelong Astro. Society about a basic mount for my new 11x70 binoculars. I showed him a few weeks ago how flimsy they were on my camera tripod. Last Friday he bought along his setup which is basically a survey tripod with a counterweighted boom and a trigger activated ball head - I thought it was simple enough and extremely effective. I will link some pictures of his setup below.
orig-01,
orig-02,
orig-03
I am keen to try and replicate this setup myself, and to that end I was able to pick up a similar survey tripod ("flat head" style) from the local branch of Alltools for about $99. Since I didn't just happen to have a Losmandy dovetail + hinge bracket nor Manfroto trigger head lying around handy, I scrounged about some of my junk to see what I could use. I did happen to have an old galvanised TV antenna pole to use as the boom, and as per
http://hmonghot.com/Q0J2Y09PWjhXYmsz, I was able to use a $3 castor wheel from Bunnings (with a few extra washers) as a frugal boom hinge. In place of the trigger head, I was able to pick up a Joby ballhead fitting from Ted's Cameras for about $30. Anyway here's a few pictures of what I was able to quickly knock together as a basic proof of concept. Clearly it still needs some work before it's ready to use but already I can see a vast improvement over using a simple camera tripod.
copy-01,
copy-02,
copy-03
At this point I can see the trigger head would be a nice convenience feature but not essential. A quick release fitting there is super handy to avoid mishaps when setting the counterweights at the other end of the boom. What clearly is essential is a sturdy mounting of the hinge at the base of the boom to the head of the tripod, and the less play in that hinge the better
FYI I have discovered in the world of AV buffs, a parallelogram mount is known as a "camera jib" or "jib crane", and something like
this would be something I'd aspire toward in a future incarnation of this mount.
