You're watching AdoramaTV. Hi everybody, welcome to AdoramaTV. I'm Mark Wallace. Well, today we're going to talk about this new tripod head from Manfrotto. It's the Manfrotto 055 series photo movie head with Q5 quick release. Now this tripod head is made specifically for DSLR photographers that are shooting both still and video with their cameras. And so this is a hybrid head that allows you to shoot both still photos and movies. And so let me talk to you about how it works. Now this has a standard 3-8 inch mount so you can put it on an existing tripod legs or choose and mix and match. So I'm going to just put this on a tripod that I had here in the studio and this just screws on there. And what would normally happen after I get this all snug or there's some counter screws that I would normally tighten up to make sure that this doesn't unscrew but just the save time we're going to skip that for now. All right, so what this does, it has a normal quick release plate. Now this plate is a little bit different than what you normally see for a still photo tripod. And you can see that this is a longer plate than we normally have on a DSLR camera. Now the reason for that is with a video head you want to be able to balance your camera. So you want to be able to move that forward or back. So you want to have a little bit of leeway there. The other reason that it's a little bit longer is if you have a system like a Zacuto rig or something that you have a base plate with rails, you want to have a lot of surface area to really lock that down and make sure that it'll support all the weight and nothing moves around. So let's put this on here. The other thing that's really nice, you hear that little click, this is a little safety button. So this will not come off accidentally unless you push that, this thing is not going to come off your tripod. So once you put this on there and I'm going to keep it back little ways, then you use this little knob right here and that keeps everything nice and secure and now I'm all mounted up and ready to go. So first let me talk to you about the different modes. We're going to start with photo mode. There's this little dial back here that allows you to select either photo or movie mode. So we're going to keep that on photo mode. Now in photo mode what we have is a basic three way head. Now normally you don't have this arm on a three way head. You might have a small one and a little one to the side. The nice thing about this is you have the ability to remove it. So I can take this guy right here and this is a little knob that just loosens up and now this comes right off and there's this little plastic piece on here and if you're wondering what that's for, well that's to quickly take that and you can just stick it on the legs of your tripod and now that's gone. So if you want to do some work with your camera, you can just loosen up your head and you've got your basic three way movement. So you've got left and right, you have up and down and you've got your vertical so you can go make sure you get vertical portraits. Now this will go to all the way down to 90 degrees this way and up here this goes to about 15 degrees. So you've got a lot of leeway to zip that around. On the side here you've got a couple of locking mechanisms. So for the pan lock you've got this big dial here that says pan lock and so that locks in the pan. You also have the friction control for the pan so you can control how easy or hard it is to move this and then there's this giant lock right here that will lock your camera and so that locks everything down and inside of that lock is the friction control for this three way head so you can control the friction for that which is really important for still photography but really important for video to make sure you have really nice smooth movements. So there's the locking mechanism. Now on the front there's something else there's another big knob here that I'm going to talk about when we get to the video mode. So there you have it, there you have this three way tripod, you've got this nice locking mechanism, you can get everything dialed in. Let's talk about what happens then when you want to shoot some video with this and so to do that the first thing you want to do is to take this and flip it over from photo to movie mode. Now what happens is this is sort of loose until click that clicks in and now you only have two movements. You have up and down and you also have left and right so you get those two movements that you would normally expect in a video tripod and what we're going to do is we're going to take this control bar and put it back on and that takes just a couple seconds. Now notice you can put this where this is angled down to the side or up and however you tighten that on there it's going to stay which is really nice. So we're going to put this down like you would normally have it. Now there's a knob on the front that I talked about let me tell you exactly what that does. So it's a silent system and it actually says on the front here CBS or for counterbalance system. So normally on a photo head if you have a long lens like this and you let go well your camera is going to drift like this and that's not what you need in a video head because you might be videotaping something and you might need to just hold that for a while and you need to be able to let go. So what this allows you to do is you can turn that on so now I have that on it clicks into place. Now when I put this in a certain location I let go and it's going to stay there so it's got a counterbalance built in so I can do that and let it go it's going to be really good. So that's a feature I really like because you're the ability for you to be moving around and following moving activity and then once it stops like a speaker or something well you can let go and you're not constantly having to hold on to that and that's really going to prevent a lot of fatigue and then once you have something locked in well you can just lock it and you can lock your pan and everything else using these knobs and it's all going to work out really really nicely. So you've got movie mode you have photo mode you have a three way head you have a nice fluid head and that's something I should mention this is a fluid head so that means that your motion is going to be nice and even and soft it's not going to be jerky and so everything is going to really work well and if things aren't if you don't have enough resistance well then you can just add a little bit more tension and depending on the weight of your camera you can adjust that so everything is going to look just wonderful. Now one thing I did notice that is just a little caveat here is if you're shooting things like airplanes or something in the sky and you have this mounted on your tripod like this well you could have issues because when you're trying to move around that's going to hit the legs so initially you think well just flip this around well that's still going to have issues but it's a really really quick solution and that's just raise the center column of your tripod and now you can do all of those really high in the air kind of movements if you're shooting something that's really high like an air show or something like that so this is really really flexible you get a lot of use out of it. So again this is the Manfrotto 055 series photo movie head with a Q5 quick release plate it retails for around $350 and it's one of those heads that I think is worth it for anybody that's doing both still photography and video work those who you who may be are travel photographers or wedding photographers event photographers this is a great option for you. Well thanks so much for joining me this week remember if you have questions about photography gear you can send those to me at askmark at adorama.com. Thanks and I'll see you again next week. This episode is brought to you by Adorama TV visit the Adorama Learning Center where you'll find photography tips and techniques links to the gear used in this episode and related videos for all the latest photography video and computer gear visit adorama.com and the next time you're in New York City visit our store located on 18th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue.