positioning a camera in 6D with Noga arm on tripod

[rjlittlefield]

Sometimes I want to put a camera at some arbitrary position and orientation and have it just stay there.

I haven't figured out a perfect way to do that, but here's a workable solution using one of my big Noga arms.

Loosen the clamp on the Noga arm, move the camera to any X/Y/Z/pitch/roll/yaw ("6D"), tighten the clamp, and it stays there.







The big gold-colored plate in the middle is just a random piece of sheet steel, tapped in two places so I could screw an Arca plate to it.

So from the ground up, we have a small tripod with ballhead, steel plate Arca-clamped to that, Noga arm magnetically clamped to the steel plate, hot shoe adapter on the end of the Noga arm, with a hotshoe-to-1/4" adapter screwed into the camera.

The above shows a compact camera because that gave a wide-angle macro perspective that I liked.

But the setup is plenty strong enough to hold a bigger camera and lens. (The Noga arms are designed to hold things in machine shops. The weak spot of the system as shown is the magnetic clamp. Augmenting that with a mechanical clamp or two would be simple enough if I needed more strength.)

Here's the setup with a DSLR and a CamRanger Mini plugged into that, so I could control the camera from my cell phone.




Here's the image from the compact camera. This is a 10-frame focus stack, hence my interest in having the camera not move.



--Rik

[Chris S.]

Clever use of a Noga Big Boy, Rik! I believe that a piece of Arca-mounted sheet steel is going to be added to my kit.

--Chris S.

[ray_parkhurst]

Beautiful pic as well.

[rjlittlefield]

Thanks, guys.

That was an interesting picture to make. I didn't know what would look good, so I flew the camera around hand-held snapping a picture everywhere that looked interesting. I looked through the collection to find which composition I liked the best, then reproduced that and improved it a bit more using the flexibility and stableness of the Noga arm rig.

It was kind of a silly lot of trouble for an image that basically just documents a strange year in my garden. But with luck the technique can be reused later, and I am amused by that one flower in the second row that seems painfully shy, turning its face to literally the opposite direction from all the others.

--Rik

[Lou Jost]

It's a beautiful picture. I like the variations in the petal color. I wonder if this is genetic variation or if the colors change as the flower ages? I suspect the latter.

[rjlittlefield]

It's a beautiful picture. I like the variations in the petal color. I wonder if this is genetic variation or if the colors change as the flower ages? I suspect the latter.

Thanks Lou.

About the colors, I think you're mostly right. Checking the plants, I find that in those cases where there are two flowers on one main stalk, the flower coming from the higher node has white side petals while the lower flower has pale violet. I also see a few flowers that appear fresh but whose side petals are dark violet or strongly bi-colored. I assume there is some different cause for those. In the photo above, there's one flower with dark violet side petals just left of the facing-backward flower. I don't see any with strongly bi-colored side petals.

--Rik

[Lou Jost]

Thanks for checking that. Some plant species have flowers that change color after pollination; this is correlated with age, but not exactly. It makes sense, since pollination of unpollinated flowers is more likely if the pollinators don't waste time (and lose pollen) on flowers that are already pollinated.