If Mohammed Won’t Come To The Mountain …

I got a fancy new tripod and ball head a couple weeks ago and I haven’t really gotten to break it in. I’ve been using an el cheapo model from Wal-Mart for a long time, but I got sucked into the thinking that a decent tripod is worth the big bucks. So I went all out (for me anyway) and got a carbon fiber number from Manfrotto. I paid a little extra to get the carbon because it’s lighter and I do a lot of hiking with my camera. I did get to try it out on a hike and though it’s bigger and more stable than my old junky tripod, it’s about the same weight. The shots of the waterfall I got on that hike weren’t even good enough to put on the blog. The tripod was an excellent buy. It does make a difference. I also was never convinced that a ball head would be that much better than the pan head you get with the cheap ‘pods. I was wrong. It makes a world of difference in the ease-of-use department.

On Sunday, I went down to the North Little Rock side of the Arkansas River to shoot the sunset over downtown Little Rock. The sunset sucked, but a great full moon was rising behind a thin veil of clouds. I cheated on the above shot by shooting the skyline and the moon separately and then combining them with my camera’s neat overlay feature. I shot the skyline from the tripod and then put on a long lens and shot the moon hand held. I don’t know if the moon ever appears in that spot if the sky from the vantage I used. But I do know the moon would never appear to be that big in a photo shot at that wide of an angle. So it’s pretty fake on at least two counts. I think it’s a little more impressive if you don’t resort to such fakery, but what the hell.

Tons of photogs have shot the skyline and posted them to Flickr, so I was trying for a little different look. This is what I came up with. The blue rail is on the Junction Bridge, an old railroad bridge that has been refitted for pedestrians.

I wanted to try out the tripod on a panorama so I shot three photos starting at the I-30 bridge continuing across the River Market and ending with the Junction Bridge. I stitched the three together in Photoshop. Normally I’m not a big fan of panos because they are awkward to view on a computer screen. (Click the photo to make it big enough to see. You’ll have to scroll back and forth to see it all. See what I mean about awkward.) I think it turned out well.