Rei Ohara | Markins BV-HEAD

I am an animal photographer, but I used to travel to conflict zones as a photojournalist.
Since then, I have made it a rule to travel light as much as possible. No matter how high-performance your equipment is, you can't take pictures if you can't take it to the scene. After my equipment was confiscated during the Tiananmen Square incident, photos I took with the last small Leica that was left were featured in the pages of the American magazine LIFE.

Even after becoming an animal photographer, I still value traveling light. As a rule, I only carry equipment that I can walk with by myself.
In recent years, restrictions on the weight and size of carry-on baggage on airplanes have become much stricter. In the past, I was able to board the plane with my body and main lens in a backpack, and another super telephoto lens in a soft case hanging from my shoulder, but now I can't do that. I am immediately charged excess baggage fees for checked baggage, so I even take a special measuring device with me to my interviews in order to stay within the limit. Therefore, every time I prepare for an interview, I feel disappointed that there is equipment left at the end that I want to take but can't.

I've switched from full-frame SLRs to APS-C mirrorless cameras. Now I can carry all my equipment, including my super telephoto lens, in one backpack. Not only can I fit the super telephoto lens in, but the backpack is smaller and lighter, so the journey to the shooting locations has become much easier.

When shooting video, the quality of the video head directly affects the quality of the video. Therefore, it is necessary to use the highest quality video head possible. Since the camera is attached with a super telephoto lens and swings up and down, and there is tension so that it stops without locking, the head that can do this had to be large.

This was fine for shooting baby seals and fireflies, which have a relatively small walking range, but when shooting the Japanese long-tailed tit, a small bird that lives in Hokkaido, which I started shooting last year, the combination of a large video head and a large tripod was not enough. First of all, it takes a lot of walking to find a Japanese long-tailed tit. Moreover, it is a bird that moves really quickly, so even after finding it, I have to move it slightly with the tripod many times.

If it were just for photography, I would follow the Japanese long-tailed tit with handheld shooting. Otherwise, it would be impossible to catch up. However, I also wanted to shoot video for a TV program, so I needed an alternative to the combination of a large tripod and a large video head that I had been using until now.

And so I ended up with the Markins Q20iQ-BK/BV-24 set. This is a combination of Markins' ball head and BV-HEAD, which limits the ball head's movement to vertical and horizontal, like a video head. I was surprised when I tried attaching a 1.4 teleconverter to the Fujifilm X-T2 and XF100-400mm I use to photograph Japanese tits. It stops exactly when I move it and let go. It can also handle sudden, large movements that video heads are not good at. Birds like Japanese tits, which fly around here and there, often move suddenly and widely beyond the range that can be followed by slowly moving the pan stick.

And the weight is amazingly light. Since the head is light, I was able to use a lighter tripod than before, so I decided to use it with Gitzo's leveling tripod GT2540LLVL. Using this tripod in combination makes it easy to level when shooting video. The total weight of the tripod and head is 3.6 kg lighter than what I was using before. For still images, the tripod mount can be used to level the super telephoto lens, so a leveling tripod is not necessary.

Thanks to this 3.6 kg reduction, I was able to take videos of Japanese long-tailed tits, which I was not able to do before. Nowadays, it is enough to cut out 4K videos for a small photo book. I can now take many still images from the videos I can shoot thanks to this head. The Markins Q20iQ-BK/BV-24 Set have become an indispensable part of my photography. When I fly for an interview, I carry this Markins head as carry-on luggage along with my camera, lenses and computer. If my checked baggage does not arrive, I can get a tripod locally as long as I have this head, but I cannot find a replacement for this head.

I usually use the set in combination, but I can also remove the BV-HEAD and use it as a free-standing head. In fact, this is something that cannot be done with a large video head. Since video heads cannot be used for vertical shooting, I used to have a separate tripod with a head for photography, but now I don't need it.

Also, when I go into a blind to shoot bird nesting activities, I find the small Markins head to be useful because it is easy to operate in a small space.

For a photographer like me who wants to enjoy animal photography without having to carry a lot of weight, the Markins Q20iQ-BK/BV-24 Set is a revolutionary item that makes me wonder what it was like to carry a big, heavy tripod and video head all those years ago.