I scanned this one many moons ago just to illustrate the failure, and never ended up using it, but now it will serve as the lead-in to this week’s Tip Jar. This is, the weakness of a cheap tripod.
Let me explain what you’re seeing here. First off, from way back in the days of shooting print film, so this is a scan from a negative that didn’t age well, probably around ’93 or ’94. This is a time exposure at night of course, of a plane landing after having passed almost directly overhead – you see the lines of the wingtip anti-collision lights and the fuselage-mounted red strobes, as well as the taxiway light appearing more green than the blue that they should, but this might have simply been my scan settings or the film.
The distinct part is the wobbling of the yellow wingtip lights; that shouldn’t be there. However, I was alongside road construction, so up on top of a bulldozer on top of a mound of fill dirt, with the tripod at full extension, including the center column, trying for the highest angle I could – which, give me credit, got the taxiway lights. However, the slight breeze demonstrated that I was using the tripod in the worst way possible, maximum instability, and it was simply vibrating regularly just from that scarce wind. I had believed I had a decent tripod at the time, something I’d ‘splurged’ on at Wolf Camera when I’d broken my previous one and needed it the next day. Plastic pan/tilt head, thin aluminum legs and center column, probably weighed under a kilogram.
It was some years later when I started getting serious about photography, buying a better camera than the Olympus OM-10 used here, and began reading articles and books about the pursuit. I realized than that the tripod was junk (this image helped,) and that I was pushing the limits of any tripod by doing things like this. The one I got as a proper replacement in the late ’90s was a Manfrotto at least four times the cost, three times the weight, and capable of splitting someone’s skull. No tripod is 100% stable, but that one showed me what it should feel like, anyway.
Curiously, I also caught something unexpected, which was the reflection of those wingtip lights onto the fuselage of the aircraft, which are the wispy squiggles in the middle of the frame. You can also look at the different sizes of red dots, cast by the fuselage and tail strobes, and see they diverge towards the left as the plane flares, nose rising so the main gear contacts first, on touchdown. I really should revisit this subject some day, but the bulldozer has probably been moved since then…