I recently wrote about the pro-caliber tripod I put together with components from Gitzo and Really Right Stuff. This time I'm writing about a monopod that I put together at the same time. However, unlike the tripod, it took two tries to get a good monopod solution, and at that, I'm still not 100% happy with it.

Update: I made some changes, described in updates below, and now I'm happy with it.

I had no problem with the monopod leg itself, a Gitzo GM3550 6X Carbon Fiber 5 Section G-Lock Monopod. It's got the G-Lock section logs that are so nice to use, and it's long enough to suit my 6'4” height.

The problem I had was with the Really Right Stuff BH-25 Pro mini ballhead. It fit on top of the Gitzo leg perfectly, and looked like it'd be great:

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 55mm — ¹/125 sec, f/6.3, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Really Right Stuff BH-25 Pro
Not recommended for a monopod

Really Right Stuff makes wonderful stuff, and as I wrote on my tripod posting, their flagship BH-55 ballhead is so finely crafted and so precisely made that one somehow feels a strange desire to lick it. It's not really possible to overemphasize the quality of and workmanship involved here.

However, their mini BH-25 is not at all in the same class. I like to think that I'm not a total wimp, but I couldn't clamp it strongly enough to stop my D200 + 17-55/2.8 from moving around. It lacks the smooth feel of its big brother (more like big third cousin). I was disappointed.

So, I called Really Right Stuff and asked if perhaps I was doing something wrong, to which they said “yes, the BH-25 is not really appropriate for a monopod.” They said that I should send the BH-25 back to them for a full refund, which I later did.

They feel that any ballhead is not really appropriate for a monopod, and instead suggested what a Manfrotto #3232 swivel head, with a Really Right Stuff B2-Pro clamp:

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 45mm — ¹/200 sec, f/4.5, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Manfrotto #3232 Swivel / RRS B2-Pro
on my Gitzo 3550 monopod

Update: I got rid of the Manfrotto swivel described here... details further below.

I ordered it while on the phone with them, and they offered to send it pre-assembled so that I'd not have to spend the 30 seconds to do it myself. I thought that was nice.

With this setup, the head allows rotation on one axis, and the monopod can be easily rotated about another. Its advantages are that movement on each axis is separate, and there's no movement on the tilt axis (movement you don't generally want with a monopod, especially if you have a rotating color on the lens); this all combines for less floppage, which is a Good Thing.™

Here's my camera mounted on it:

Kodak DX6490 — ¹/500 sec, f/4.5, ISO 80 — map & image data — nearby photos

I've used it a few times now, and still need more practice, but one thing I'm not happy about is that it requires a wrench when switching between a lens with a mounting foot and one without. A quick-release clamp on a camera is mounted at right angles to one mounted on the foot of a zoom lens, and since the Manfrotto swivel moves on only one axis, the clamp installed on top of it needs to be rotated 90° when switching lenses. That requires a wrench, and sort of defeats the whole purpose of quick-release clamps.

One way to solve the problem is to mount the zoom's quick-release clamp sideways. This would be a perfect solution except that the plate is intended to be mounted lengthwise with two bolts, and could tend to allow rotation when mounted with just one bolt. It'd be a kludge, at best.

Now, if Really Right Stuff (or anyone) produced a right-angle quick-release clamp for a zoom, the problem would be solved.

Update: I ended up dumping the horrid Manfrotto swivel for a Really Right Stuff product that came out a few years later, their High-Capacity Monopod Head, a wonderful product that makes my monopod solution complete.

I need more practice with my monopod, and I need to read stuff like this guide to using a monopod. I used it somewhat clumsily when photographing the scruffy wet birds the other day, and quite a bit yesterday at the train station.

Here's a picture my sister snapped of me while I was snapping pictures of the kids:

Konica-Minolta Maxxum 7D — ¹/250 sec, f/6.3, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Marginal Monopod Stance

Had I known she was taking pictures of me, I would have pretended to use a better stance. It's good that my feet aren't together, and good that I'm draping my free hand over the head of the long 70-200 f/2.8 zoom to dampen vibrations, but the tripod is straight up and down, which is not as good as having it angled out away from me like a third tripod leg.

The problem was as described above: I didn't have the wrench with me, so I couldn't reset the clamp for the zoom lens, effectively disabling any sensible adjustability on the head. I could adjust only so far as I could tilt the thing, and that was it.

It was still a pleasure to work with, and I'm sure the results were much better than I would have gotten handheld. I'll probably adjust the clamp for use with the zoom, and generally forgo the monopod when using a shorter lens. We'll see.

As I mentioned yesterday, I let Anthony use my camera with the monopod. You can't tell in the picture below, but the big zoom was attached, so at first I was a bit tentative to let him handle things...

Konica-Minolta Maxxum 7D — ¹/160 sec, f/7.1, ISO 100 — map & image data
Photo by Marci Kreta
Anthony Takes a Picture of His Aunt
...taking a picture of her nephew

Here's the shot he was taking...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — ¹/250 sec, f/5, ISO 400 — map & image data
Photo by Anthony Friedl
Aunt Marci Takes a Picture of Her Nephew
...taking a picture of his aunt

After a bit, I let him do it on his own, and all by himself he took this shot of me and Josh (that was included in my previous post):

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — ¹/500 sec, f/5, ISO 400 — map & image data
Photo by Anthony Friedl
Portrait by Anthony

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 120mm — ¹/180 sec, f/10, ISO 400 — map & image data — nearby photos
Marci and Josh Kreta
Enjoying the Trains

As I mentioned the other day, my sister Marci is visiting my folks' with her 17-month-old son, Josh, for the last week that Anthony and I are here, and for another week after to help ease my parents' empty-nest feeling.

Yesterday we made the half-hour drive to a particularly bleak part of the world called the Alliance Amtrak Station. The station itself was like a run-down bus stop in the most desolate area of town, but it had one great thing going for it: trains.

The “station” (if you could call it that — it's just a slab of asphalt with a little sun-shade waiting area) is at the junction of two train lines that are well trafficked by freight trains. So, we went to see some trains.

Konica-Minolta Maxxum 7D — ¹/800 sec, f/6.3, ISO 100 — map & image data
Photo by Marci Kreta
Train Tracks!

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — ¹/250 sec, f/5, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Running When No Trains Were Running
The “station” is in the background. Can you say “bleak?”

At one point, to the horror of my Mom (or any sane adult), I let four-year-old Anthony use my D200 with a big Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 on a monopod, and he took a few nice shots...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — ¹/2500 sec, f/5, ISO 400 — map & image data
Photo by Anthony Friedl
Cousin Josh and Aunt Marci

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — ¹/800 sec, f/5, ISO 400 — map & image data
Photo by Anthony Friedl
Little Josh Checks out the Tracks

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — ¹/500 sec, f/5, ISO 400 — map & image data
Photo by Anthony Friedl
Daddy and his Nephew Josh

And now with the camera back in my own hands....

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 140mm — ¹/400 sec, f/5, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Ignoring the Bad Example

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — ¹/160 sec, f/5, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
“Come on Josh, Let's Race”

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — ¹/160 sec, f/5, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
“Come on Josh, You Can Do It!”

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — ¹/800 sec, f/2.8, ISO 100 — map & image data — nearby photos
Making Silly Faces While Waiting for Josh

I've got to say that I'm very proud with how Anthony is playing the “big cousin” role. He tries to be helpful and patient, and succeeds more than I would have expected.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — ¹/1600 sec, f/2.8, ISO 200 — map & image data — nearby photos
Josh Making “Chooooo Choooo” Train Sounds

Two years after introducing the D200, Nikon today announced its successor, the Nikon D300, and also the latest in its pro line, the full-frame $5,000 Nikon D3.

As I expected of any Nikon new-body announcement, this is really a no-win situation for me. Either the new camera is good enough that I'm left feeling relatively disappointed in my Nikon D200, or the new camera is pedestrian enough that I'm left disappointed in Nikon.

After reading the above-linked previews on Digital Photography Review, the drool on my keyboard is telling me the result. 🙂

In the “D200 vs. D300” specification comparison presented about half-way down the preview, items for which one camera has a clear advantage over the other are shown in green. The D300's column is completely green, except for camera weight and size, which are essentially unchanged from the D200.

For the D300, particularly appealing to me are:

• Better low-light performance
• Much higher resolution LCD monitor (44% larger, but 4× the pixels)
• Self-cleaning sensor
• LCD Live-view (a'la consumer point-n-shoots)

I probably won't get one because I don't need one, but if I really care about quality, I really should upgrade to the higher-performance sensor, shouldn't I? 🙂   Bjørn Rørslett, a noted nature photographer, says “The new D3 has high-ISO performance beyond what anyone could imagine possible. I could hardly believe my eyes.” I don't know how much of that is found in the D300, but I'll be keeping my eyes out.

When the D200 came out, it was in short supply for months, causing all kinds of angst in the Nikon community. It looks like Nikon will try to avoid that this time: the Japanese press releases indicate that they'll have an initial production of 60,000 units/month for the D300 compared with 40,000 units/month for the D200 back in late 2005. (For comparison, the D3 is scheduled for 8,000/month.)

About a year after the D200 came out, the public speculation for the next Nikon camera really geared up, and it's been extremely intense for the last six months or so. Really intense — lots of speculation. Today's announcements will quell that for a short while, replacing it with speculation on how what's been announced will actually perform.

But I'll start the speculation on the next announcement: perhaps 18 months from now, Nikon will announce a full-frame D400. Hmmm, I may just have to put off my D300 purchase to wait for that.... 😀

My sister Marci drove up with her 17-month-old (Josh) to join us for our last week in Ohio. While Anthony was at school yesterday, the rest of us went out to a restaurant for lunch. Without Anthony to keep my hands full, I tried to help a bit with Josh, who was being somewhat of a handful. In the middle of both of us trying to give him some chicken noodle soup, I had a realization that I could put to good use.

Me: Hey Marci, I just thought of something that will really gross you out!

Marci gets this look on her face that says "I grew up with four brothers. I've been an emergency-room nurse for 20 years. You can't possibly gross me out" and says...

Marci: Uh, I don't think so, but give it a try...

I gestured to the seating arrangements, with the two of us on either side of Josh, both attending to Josh, and the next generation (our folks) on the other side of the table...

Me: Everyone looking at us will think that this is our child.

Marci's face morphs into a mask of horror and disgust. I'd won a great victory.

Katz Eye™ Focusing Screen
for the Nikon D200

(Note: this post will be of interest only to camera geeks)

Continuing in the series on the camera toys I've picked up on this trip to The States (other entries: GPS unit, tripod), this post is about the Katz Eye Focusing Screen that I picked up for my Nikon D200.

An SLR's focusing screen is a frosted piece of glass that you're actually looking at when you look through the viewfinder, upon which the lens projects the scene being viewed by the camera.

Katz Eye Optics is a company that makes replacement focusing screens for all kinds of cameras. (They're owned by a family whose last name is “Katz,” so I think the name is quite witty.)

The Benefits

The stock Nikon focusing screen is apparently designed with autofocus in mind, because it's not particularly suited for use when manually focusing the lens. For marketing and technological reasons that I don't quite understand, the stock Nikon focusing screen leaves ample room for improvement, which the $95 Katz Eye provides:

• The Katz Eye adds a split-image prism harking back to the SLRs of old. A split circle in the center of the screen, the image in the two halves are shifted away from center until the item in the center is in focus, at which point the two halves become one.

  If you've never used one of these, you're in for a treat the first time you're faced with one of the many situations where it's useful (in particular, where there are vertical lines of contrast near the center of the scene that can bisect where the two semicircles join). With it, you can achieve perfect focus.

• Outside the split-image prism is a doughnut-shaped area of microprisms, shown as a thick dark ring in the photo above. Like the split-image prism pair of half circles, the image in this area looks normal when the subject is in focus, but when focus is lost, areas of contrast quickly become a jagged patterned field that looks sort of like a closeup of an old halftone newspaper photo.

  The microprism section is extremely sensitive to proper focus, so it's with this that you can achieve the most perfect focus. Even the slightest hint of movement in the focus ring turns the microprism area from a clean image to jaggies, so if you see the clean image, you know that the focus is perfect.

• Finally, the entire screen shows “focus snap” much better than the stock screen. It's much easier to judge proper focus just by looking at the image on the whole screen.

  (For the same reason, it's also said to render the depth-of-field better, but I haven't yet played with that much.)

The Katz Eye in Action

I love it.

I thought I'd love it for the split-image prism, which I had on my first SLR 20+ years ago, but it's turned out that I don't really use that very much because the microprism is so much easier for most situations. Especially when I have the luxury of time to focus, the microprisms give me exceptional confidence with manual focus.

When the situation doesn't allow a lot of time to focus (such as with birds and kids), I find the enhanced “focus snap” of the entire screen to be the best way for me to get focus quickly: I simply adjust focus until the subject looks sharp.

I still use autofocus for a lot of things, especially when I have a lot of light and can use a smaller aperture (such as with most shots of the fallen tree the other day).

OptiBrite

Katz Eye offers an optional “OptiBrite” treatment to its focus screens which, for $55 extra, aims to make for a brighter image in the viewfinder, at the expense of some focus snap. This would be appealing with slow lenses (lenses whose minimum f-number is large, such as 5.6 or more) because they don't let in as much light as a faster lenses.

I did not get the OptiBrite option because I normally use fast lenses (primarily a Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 and a Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8, and sometimes a Sigma 30 f/1.4).

With my lenses, the standard Katz Eye seems as bright as the stock Nikon screen, and I'm very happy with it as is.

Metering

If you're thinking of getting one, there are many discussion threads about them, such as this one that contains a lively discussion of the pros and cons. One con is that the new screen can effect exposure metering in one specific case: when the camera is in single-point metering mode, and the center point has been selected.

This is not a mode that the beginning photographer is likely to use very often, but it becomes a useful tool once you're comfortable with the different metering modes. One of the posts in the discussion just referenced is one guy's report on metering in that mode with his Katz Eye, and is a useful read.

The Install

I received my Katz Eye a few days after I arrived from Japan, and while the installation is supposed to be simple, I opted to stop by a local camera shop and have it installed because the installation involves sticking tools inside the camera and I was traveling and away from the mental comfort of my own work area. They'd never done one of these, but knew their cameras and did it without incident for twenty bucks.

However, I later noticed that the circle on the screen was not perfectly centered over the center auto-focus-selector point, and once I noticed, it drove me batty. So, I decided to go in and fix it myself.

Using the verbose installation instructions that comes with the Katz Eye, I found so extremely simple that I felt embarrassed for not having done it by myself in the first place. Should I ever need to do it again, I can now swap the focusing screen in, literally, 20 seconds from start to finish. Well, almost....

It's surprisingly difficult get the screen centered properly because there's some side-to-side play in the camera's screen cradle, and the slightest sliver of misplacement shows up quite noticeably as a misalignment when viewing through the viewfinder. Thus, the desire for accurate centering can turn a quick install into somewhat more of a production, as I'll write about below....

My Katz Eye Install Hints

(These hints will make the most sense once you've seen the Katz Eye instructions.)

1. After removing the lens and placing the camera lens-mount-up on the table, I placed a lens-cleaning cloth over the mirror, to provide a bit of protection “just in case.” I used a Sputz, another of my new toys.

2. To clip and unclip the focusing screen's small retaining wire, rather than a small screwdriver that the instructions recommend, I used what turned out to be a cuticle trimmer. I found it lying around the house and thought it'd be perfect for controlling the retaining wire because it has a head that sort of resembles a flat-head screwdriver with a center notch. I had no idea at the time what it actually was, but it turned out to be perfect.

   This online store is selling what looks to be exactly what I used, two for $5.

3. While working the wire (clipping or unclipping), rest the thumb of your free hand across the bottom of the lens mount, then rest the tool (cuticle trimmer or screwdriver) on your thumb with a fair amount of pressure such that the tool's movement is just a rocking that pivots on your thumb. This effectively removes much of the worry about slipping (which could easily cause you to scratch the focus screen).

4. After placing the screen, but before resetting the retaining wire, carefully lift the camera so that you can look through the viewfinder at a bright wall/ceiling so that you can judge whether the screen is properly centered. While doing this, you have to be careful not to rotate the camera too far toward the vertical, or else the un-retained screen will flop out. I found it easier to hold the camera mostly upside-down when doing this.

   If you see that the centering is not perfect, lightly tap the camera with one hand to nudge the screen a bit. It can be very touchy, so may require a few back-and-forth taps.

   Once you think it's perfect, carefully put the camera body back down and reaffix the retaining wire. It's really easy to nudge the screen out of alignment when you do this, so you may have to repeat this step over and over again until you get it aligned to your liking.

5. When reclipping the retaining wire, don't worry if it doesn't catch right away. While futzing with the alignment, I clipped and unclipped the wire dozens of times, and even after that much practice, there were times when it would take me quite a while (30 seconds of frustration) to get the clip to catch. Sometimes, it took one second. I don't know what I was doing differently to cause such a difference.

From start to finish, it took perhaps 10 minutes for me to get comfortable with what I was doing and get the alignment perfect.

Because I'd had the lens off for so long and was working around the lens mount, after I was done I did a simple test for dust on the camera's sensor. There was quite a bit (which may have been there before; I don't know), so I cleaned the sensor, and then I was done.