One of the most common complaints I hear from photographers regarding their tripods is that they are simply too heavy and too large to use comfortably. Of course there’s a truism that the larger and heavier the tripod the sturdier it is likely to be. All else being equal, greater size and mass generally do provide advantages in stability, particularly in wind and with heavier loads. But tripod design matters enormously, and heavy tripods are not all made equal. So too is the case for lightweight tripods. 

For a very long time I have been a firm advocate for panoramic photography. I have always enjoyed the widescreen type of view that a panoramic image offers, possibly a result of cutting my teeth on wide screen movies in my youth. By widescreen I am referring to what the film industry has dubbed ‘CinemaScope’. This is an aspect ratio of 2,39:1 (sometimes rounded to 2,4:1). This is even wider than the standard definition of a panoramic image which is any image where the long side is more than double the shirt side in length. Technically widescreen as we associate it with digital - being 16:9 - is actually just under where panoramic is considered to start. At any rate, CinemaScope is meant to create an expansive, immersive view for the cinema-goer. Highly acclaimed cinematic films such as Peter Jackson’s ‘Lord of the Rings’, Ridley Scott’s ‘Gladiator’, and Christopher Nolan’s ‘Inception’ were all filmed and projected for the the 2,39:1 ratio. The cinematographer Bill Pope used the extra-wide canvas to particular effect for the bullet time sequences in ‘The Matrix’.