Tripod levelling, it is a small thing….
One of my seriously pet hates when looking at landscapes is a non-level horizon. Once I see it in a photo I can’t unseen it and no matter how amazing the image, it nags at me. It is part of the reason that my main tripods have levelling heads, just to make the basic set up so much quicker. Now for normal images you can usually fix it in post, but when doing panoramas a non level camera during sweep can be much harder to stitch and cause lots of headaches.
Then there is astro-landscape photography, if you are using a tracker as I often do, it is is really important that you start off with the tripod level so it makes it easier to polar align going forward. And, if you are using something like the Benro Polaris, well it is essentially mandatory for it to work. Most tripods and levelling heads these days come with a small bubble level, but they are small and sometimes, well, they suck… Lots of people (including myself) use either their phone or one of the larger bubble levels readily available in stores like Amazon to level the tripod. There is the small inconvenience here that before you put the tracker on the tripod there is a really inconvenient bolt sticking up from the centre of its otherwise nice level surface. You can work around it, I often level the tripod once I have the Polaris in place, but it is a bit of pain.
So once again a bit of 3d printing to the rescue. I made a simple little disk that slipped over the bolt and created a level surface that you can fit a 60mm level in as shown below.
This is plenty big enough for my poor old eyes to use and takes up no more space in the bag than the level itself. If I want to use my phone as level instead it still provides a nice level surface to put it on.
Now this is seriously not an original or novel idea (I think I have seen a number of similar work arounds on the various forums), but it makes my life easier and if anyone else would like one, the file to print it out is available below. It is the little things that make life easier.
