EasyTravel

The Atoll is a novel tackle the normal tripod lens collar for simple vertical capturing for stills and video

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At first, the Atoll may appear to be only a common tripod collar, the type that many people have used with our lenses for years – not less than telephoto lenses. However Atoll comes with a little bit of a twist (no pun meant) that means that you can get that lens collar performance with lenses that weren’t truly designed to have a collar connected.

It’s basically two mounting plates in a single – one which goes on prime of your tripod head and one which mounts beneath your digicam – linked through a rotating ring that goes round your lens and means that you can simply rotate it with out having to cope with the inherent problems with ball heads and blocking cable connections. It’s been launched by means of Kickstarter the place it’s already hammered its purpose a number of instances over.

It’s a bit like a lazy Susan to your digicam. A metallic ring rotates inside itself with one foot that attaches to your tripod head and a plate that goes beneath your digicam physique. You possibly can then rotate your digicam simply as you’d with a telephoto lens utilizing a conventional tripod collar. It’s designed primarily to assist recover from the problems of a ball head, similar to shifting the centre of gravity off to the facet and having to waste time fiddling round to get issues simply stage once more (which could be a ache when your plate’s at 90° to the ball).

However for video shooters, particularly in in the present day’s world stricken by vertical video, it means you possibly can have your digicam rotated in a vertical orientation with out issues like HDMI cables (or your flippy out LCD) getting in the best way – a typical downside with the standard L brackets – because the digicam itself hangs barely off behind the tripod plate. Given the price of your common respectable L bracket today, this appears to be like like a good different.

The Atoll permits for a full 360° of limitless rotation. And one space the place this is likely to be of specific usefulness is with macro photographers that usually shoot out within the subject. If you happen to’ve ever had your tripod centre column reversed and pointing down in direction of the bottom along with your digicam hanging the wrong way up, you’ll know precisely what I’m speaking about. Certain, you possibly can flip issues round in publish, however it’s an entire lot simpler in case you don’t need to, no?

After all, all manufacturers and even particular person cameras throughout the similar model are totally different. There are slight dimension variations between the place (and diameter) of the lens mount and the tripod socket on the digicam. And whereas there may be some stage of adjustability out there on the Atoll, there are three totally different variations out there in several sizes relying on the digicam and lens you’re utilizing. After all, there are additionally one or two caveats.

It’s undoubtedly an attention-grabbing answer and one which I’d most likely look into for capturing landscapes if I hadn’t principally resigned myself to capturing landscapes with lenses that have already got tripod collars for stitching enormous panoramics on the pc. If I had been capturing with a wider lens, although, one thing like this could undoubtedly be important for me as I usually shoot landscapes with a video tripod – these bowl heads are so a lot simpler to stage!

If you happen to’re fascinated about discovering out extra, head on over to Kickstarter, the place Atoll has already overwhelmed its purpose 8x over and pledges begin at $79.



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