A Reasonable Backpacking Tripod

While hand-holding can work just fine for most general daylight photography, a tripod is critical as the light fades and the best photographic opportunities arise.  A tripod is also necessary for many techniques used to enhance final image quality including but not limited to HDR, nodal point panoramas, and focus stacking.  Unfortunately for our purposes, tripod stability is highly inversely correlated with tripod heft.  Thus my goal was to find the absolute lightest setup that will reasonably hold a full frame DSLR with an attached f/2.8 zoom.

In addition to an excellent strenght/weight ratio I look for twist leg-locks and an Arca-style quick release for speed of deployment and a bottom hook for hanging weight.  My solution consists of the following:

Oben CT-2331 - 26.4oz (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/864593-REG/oben_ct_2331_3_section_carbon_fiber.html)

Really Right Stuff BH-25 - 4.1oz  (http://www.reallyrightstuff.com/Shop/BH-25-Ultra-Light-Ballhead/BH-25-Ultra-light-ballhead-no-clamp-no-platform.html)

Sunwayfoto DDC-37 - 1.55oz (http://www.amazon.com/SUNWAYFOTO-DDC-37-SunwayFoto-Screw-Knob-Clamp/dp/B00BFD7Y4Q)*

*This Arca-style clamp has an M5 mounting hole that needs to be drilled out for compatibility with 1/4-20.

After removing the mounting platform from the tripod and screwing the head directly onto the center column, the total weight comes to 1 lb, 12 oz.  This gives the tripod the following specs:

Height without center column extended -   47"

Height with center column extended-         56"

Folded length-                                          21"

Weight-                                                   1.75 lbs

Manufacturer weight rating-                       8.8 lbs / 4 kg

Using the typical rule for tripods of:

Practical weight rating = Manufacturer weight rating / 2

this tripod should hold the 4 lb weight of my 5DS and 24-70 F/2.8.  There is only one way to find out for certain and is a good excuse to play around with camera equipment.  Lab test!  For the following test I shot a test chart with the 5DS and the 24-70 f/2.8 ii @ 70mm f/5.0, ISO 100, 3.2s exposure.

This is an 8:1 crop.  We can see that critical sharpness has been achieved.  However, I did have to use a cable release or >0.5s mirror lockup with the on camera shutter release to achieve stability.

Note that there are some subtle color shifts in the image.  These are imaging artifacts and not real despite the anti-aliasing filter on this camera.  Intriguing, but the subject of another post. 

The number of tripod and ballhead choices out there are absurd compared to even ten years ago.  I could not have researched every possible combination so please share what you have come up with!