Kit Upgrade!
This Monday and Tuesday I worked on a corporate shoot that required a lot of panning and tilting combined with a lot of walking around in the unusually hot July sun. I packed my Benro sticks and Weifeng 717AH fluid head, thinking the combination a perfect (and light!) one for the job. The Weifeng head has had a lot of good buzz online, with popular DSLR blog Cheesy Cam going so far as to label it a ‘hidden treasure’ and perhaps it is. I picked mine up on Ebay for around £40 plus postage and packing, a steal for a 360 pan head with a compact design.
Long story short, however, it turns out my dad’s old saying was right - “you pays your money, you takes your choices” (yes, English is his first language, surprisingly). My head managed to fail me spectacularly on Monday, with the joint between the panning sections coming loose rendering even static shots unsteady, let alone pans. Me and the shoot director defected to the coffee area while I got my trusty hex keys out and disassembled the head, managing to get it ship shape for about the next two hours before it failed again. A word about hex keys: get some. If you’re an aspiring Camera op/DOP these MUST be in your kit bag. Stanley does a great set on Amazon for a fiver so you have no excuses! Fortunately on the day my colleague Mahdi Nejad from MTN Productions was kind enough to drive 20 miles to bring the production house Vinten Pro Tripod to the shoot, and the rest of the day/next day went swimmingly, but I certainly learned a valuable lesson. Which is why I was so super psyched to get this in the post this morning:
Yup, it’s a Manfrotto 501HDV Video Head and I absolutely love it already. This one is a strong recommend: as a DOP friend once said to me, if you can’t get movements as smooth as butter on your current shooting set-up then it is completely useless.
Just for comparison, here’s the two heads together. You can see which one is the far sturdier and better built:
Of course, the biggest difference is price. The Manfrotto will set you back around £130 on Amazon (a bargain for this piece of kit, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it rise by £20 soon), which is over three times the price of the Weifeng. But if it means the difference between completing a job successfully or ruining your perfect shot composition, it’s hardly a choice, is it? The load capacity of this head is over 6KG, which is far greater than your average 5D with super heavy 70-200mm lens AND onboard mic AND onboard monitor etc. The Weifeng? I doubt it could hold so much. My Kit: a little bit closer to perfect. But still a little way to go…
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