One of the problems with getting increasing sharp lenses (and extending them) is a smaller version of what long-telephotos have – everything shakes!
I have a small studio on the second floor of our home. I am in the process of emptying out and selling my larger studio because it is too far away, about half a block. LOL. But getting me out of the house in winter and down there is very difficult, although it is a 40x40 foot building with two and a half floors and huge space and high ceilings. But that’s just me.
Anyway, the problem is that I live in an old-ish house and the floors are not steady. With finer and finer lenses and especially at higher magnification ratios and especially-especially if I magnify focus, the world shakes like a leaf on a tree, which is terrifying for a photographer doing still photos. Ouch!
What to do? It is so bad that, even if I am just standing quietly and not moving in the room, my breathing (or whatever) causes the subject to slightly shake – just being there! At first I could not believe it. Nothing was moving, including me (as best I could), yet still there were these nano-quakes going on! The bottom line is that this is not good for taking photos. Yes, I get somewhat decent phots, but somewhat decent is not what I have to get out of these lenses.
And of course, I tried building little buffered pads for me to stand on, hopefully isolating ME from the floor, but it seemed to me like instead of isolating, it only “features” me as the shake-dancer. LOL.
So, floor treatments (aside from rebuilding the entire room) with cement don’t work. Then I had a bit on an idea. The floor shakes, but the foundation of the building does not, or only minutely. What not hang a heavy shelf off the walls to hold my subjects. I did and it works great to isolate the subject. I used this for a while and it isolated the subject, but still left me, myself, and I as the culprit. Just out there standing in the room, even holding my breath, the vibrations found their way up the tripod (which is on the floor, of course) all the way to the camera and lens. And they shake!
I tried all kinds of ways to isolate the tripod feet, including the astronomical pads, many kinds of isolation pads, gooey-stuff, and on and on. No matter how I piled the isolation pads, there was still movement.
Next, I tried hanging a second shelf off the wall and put both the subject and tripod on a large board. That helped some, but mostly succeeded in transferring the camera shake from me touching it to focus to the subject being photographed. As they say, “Close, but no cigar,” well, closer.
My next attempt was to build a second shelf unit (again, off the wall), but isolated from the unit with the subject. So, in the middle of the night I built second set of two shelves, again them hanging off the wall, but not touching the floor. And on this I put a second board, one just for the tripod, but, as mentioned, separate from the subject.
By Golly, this works! The subject, which is hanging of the wall on a shelf does not move. The tripod shelf, also hanging off the wall on a board supported by dual shelves does move, except when I touch the rig to focus. I can move around on the floor now (and breath, which is healthy) and there almost no transfer of vibration.
The penalty, which is there anyway, is that with each touch of the focusing, there is an after-shake, as we might expect. I have to wait a few seconds for the whole thing to calm down and then take the photo.
I am already using the silent-shutter on the Nikon D850, so there is no mirror-slap, only the vibrations that stem from touching the focus barrel. However, if you are stacking 100 or so photos, that is a lot of wait-time, but that’s the price I pay for removing the shake.
So, now I can move around the floor and do the stuff I have to do without affecting the subject or the tripod/camera with added vibrations. I do find myself sitting down to photograph, since extending the tripod legs adds to the shake-component. Take this particular rig outside into the Michigan winds? Not likely!
Here is a quick photo taken with the Nikon D810 and the newish Nikon 8-15mm Zoom of the system. That’s a Nikon D850 sitting on a Novoflex focus rail with an rail knob that allows finer movement. On the D850 is the Schneder Macro Varon 85mm lens, with two PK-13 Extensions tubes (55mm total), and three K-3 rings as a hood. That sits on the Arca-Swiss Cube, sits on a Series 3 RRS tripod.
And the whole thing, as mentioned sits on a board held by two 20” steel shelves extending out from the walls. And the subject, an African daisy sits on two separate shelves that hold a thin board. Sorry about the mess, but that’s usual with me, stuff all around. There are also a couple of paper-wrapped bricks and two video sandbags on the wide board, just to see if they help.
Any suggestions on dampening the tripod/camera from when I touch to focus would be appreciated. That is where all the vibration comes now. I have a 3-second delay on the camera, after I decide it has calmed down enough to chance that.
This is a partial stack. Look at the area inside the blue ellipse. That’s about as good as this lens will do. I will do a large portion at some point. There ARE other lenses too that should not be shaken.
Why bother with all of this? Well, why bother anything? LOL.