carstenw
Active member
This reminds me of something:I was using a Gitzo aluminium GT2330 with Manfortto 322RC2 ball head - a combo I chose for weight, apparent sturdiness, and the fact that it packs into my suitcase. The strange thing was that nearly all shots at between 1/25th and 1/80th were lost, regardless of wind conditions, whereas some at 1/4 second survived. I did lose one rubber foot somewhere so the footing maybe wasn't so great, and the base was often snow or fine volcanic sand so maybe those were issues - but I have a sneaky feeling that there's some kind of oscillation in the rig, even with MUP and release, that comes purely from the shutter...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mclp9QmCGs
Like Stuart, I suspect your ballhead, but a little wind can do freaky things. Changing the weight or height of the tripod setup could change the harmonic frequency, and thus potentially avoid problems. The trick is to detect the problem. I guess a laptop is the way to go, since the image banks don't understand Phase files.
Interestingly, two aspects of the S2 design may have avoided this problem. First of all, the screen is much higher res than the other MF screens, coming close to a D3x, and secondly, the file format is DNG, so it is possible that image banks could view the photos, giving you a closer look at the results on a larger screen, without carrying around a laptop. Food for thought.
Care to post a sample image which was ruined by vibration?