Hmm, what can I say here other than tripods and heads are essential and there are so many choices that really it becomes a personal choice. What I will say is you can save yourself a lot of money if you really think about things before you proceed to make purchase. What I mean by that is, we have spent so much money on many different tripods and many different heads. Had we known back then, what we know now we would have saved heaps. So lets talk about that.
ARCA Quick Connects:
OK, so continuing from where I left off above.
What you see on the left is various ARCA plates, what they have in common is they are all inter-connectable, they are made to the same spec.
So now we can replace the standard feet on our big zoom lenses with ARCA ones (shown top left).
Then we put ARCA L plates on our camera, now the camera is unable to twist on its mount and it is able to quickly switch between portrait and landscape mode (shown bottom right). The we can also add all sorts of other ARCA quick connects and plates to use in many different ways: Flash brackets, panoramic rails, tripod heads and gimbals and the list goes on.
Main point, if we could do it all from the beginning, we would have standardized on ARCA compatible brackets and connectors from day one.
So taking the stuff above, now look how it all connects together - Just AWESOME!
Kirk Enterprises BH-1 Ballhead:
There are good ballheads and there are bad ballheads, how do you know which? I don't know the answer to that other than use google, search the ball head add problems to the phrase and review the results. Lets just say we bought an expensive Gitzo ball head we were totally disappointed with, wish we had done some research.
The current ballhead we use is the Kirk one shown, but I also like very much what I see on the Really Right Stuff website. What you can see here is again an ARCA compatible connector, not propriety like Bogen, Manfrotto, Gitzo and none of them fit together. With ARCA compatible you get so many options, like the ballhead connecting straight to the L-Bracket or to the Wimberley Gimbal shown below. Again, the options are limitless.
WH-200 Wimberley Head Version II:
We use the Wimberley, it is the original creator of this gimbal style head. There are other great makers of gimbal heads, but make sure whatever you choose is ARCA compatible.
For example; the Wimberley works perfectly with L-Plates, replacement lens feet and ARCA standard connectors.
The Wimberley / Gimbal head is awesome for large lenses, you can balance a 600mm perfectly and have pan and tilt in any direction with the touch of a finger. You can line up you shot on a nest of something and lock it in position, now just press the shutter release when the action starts. The Wimberley is very strong and sturdy. If you have large lenses, this is a must have piece of equipment.
Pano Equipment:
Nodal slide clamp and panoramic panning clamp.
The stuff shown on the left is all made by 'Really Right Stuff', I like the stuff they make. It is high quality and very functional, I have actually bought quite a bit of stuff from them. I will eventually replace my Gitzo tripods with theirs, mainly because I like the fact they are made in America.
Also, I really want to switch to a self levelling tripod setup. Back to the topic at hand, if you want to stitch photos together to make panoramics from multiple exposures, you really need a setup similiar to what is shown. Why? Because you need to eliminate parallax, check out the 'Really Right Stuff' website for instructions on taking multiple image panoramics.