ADJUSTABLE CAMERA MOUNT

-

For about the last year I've been using my B-camera on a camera slider and the connection between the two was a 'Z' mount. It was OK, but had a severely limited range of motion, and in the last few months the friction bolts that hold the bits in place have become less able to do their job. I decided to make a mounting of my own based on an old anglepoise lamp. I had begun a project with this a few years ago - I was going to make an adjustable video light using a square biscuit tin with some LED strips inside it. But for some reason that barely got started and I now have enough adjustable video lights so there's not much point in building another one.

I removed the light fitting and shade from the lamp, and this reveals a circular holder to connect a new 3D printed part into. This part is basically a mash-up of an Arca-Swiss-style quick release holder and a notched disc that fits into the holder ring on the lamp. It's incredibly simple and hugely effective. The range of motion is much improved and the anglepoise mechanism of the lamp base means that you never have to screw anything in place - it's able to hold any position you move it to, even with a camera attached. I also made a thing to connect the anglepoise to the slider, but that's another story.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MacAllister Electric Planer Review

-
Image
I damaged my old electric planer when trying to change the blades. I would have read the manual, but I'd lost it. A quick trawl of the interwebz showed cheap and tacky planers (like my old one) at about £25-£30, a few around £50 and big name brands from £150 and up. I'm not one for buying professional-quality stuff, and I don't have a favoured brand that I would always buy. And let's face it, even well-known brands can produce the occasional lemon. One planer that caught my eye was the MacAllister one - MSHP900 3MM PLANER 230-240V. Like all of their tools, it has a pleasing light grey and black colour scheme - a bit like a Star Wars Storm Trooper - with sky blue highlights. It promised to be able to cut up to 3mm at a time, unlike most of the others which can only do 2mm. But I think what sold it to me, as a left-hander, was the ability to fit the dust bag on either the left- or right-hand side. It was £50 from Screwfix. It was a new product, so there were no...
Read more

Evolution R255+ Sliding Mitre Saw | Unboxing, Assembly, First Use, Review

-
Image
Evolution R255+ Sliding Mitre Saw Having bought and reviewed the  Evolution Rage 3S  about a year ago, it's now time to have a look at its big brother, the Evolution R255+ Sliding Mitre Saw. Full disclosure: Evolution Power Tools sent me this to review, and I have received no payment. I've seen the basic model on sale for about £150-£170. The Plus model, which I reviewed, is about £20-£30 more. The first thing you notice as you open the box and decant the contents, is its size. It's ENORMOUS! There's a single-sheet assembly diagram, accompanied by a small booklet of detailed instructions. Both these items use line drawings rather than photographs, and they are extremely clear. Assembly is quite straightforward, but I did make the error of inserting the slide rail unit upside down and it wasn't until I'd fitted the machine head and tried to fit the slide rail cover that I realised. So I had to do a bit of disassembly. Get the handle the right way up ...
Read more

I'm Back!

-
Image
 I'm back - well, actually, I never went away but you could be forgiven for thinking I had. My last entry on this blog was almost 2 years ago and basically it was telling you that the YouTube channel was becoming a vlog - a weekly summary of what I'd been up to and things that had caught my eye in the previous week. I did that for about a year but never produced anything on the blog to go along with it - the videos alone were taking far too long to edit and there was no time or inclination left for me to produce write-ups too. So I stopped the vlog in May 2022 - it wasn't really a conscious decision, it just kind of happened. But lately I've been thinking about rebooting it, mainly because I've spent the last month or two learning Blender and I wanted to create a lasting record of the things I've learnt. If you don't know what Blender is, it's a brilliant piece of Open Source software for creating 3D models and animations. It does CGI, basically. It isn...
Read more