fbpx

DIY Photography

Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time

Search

Submit A Story

Zhiyun’s new Weebill 2 gimbal has a built in flippy out touchscreen LCD

by Leave a Comment

Zhiyun has today (yes, today, not yesterday) announced the new Zhiyun Weebill 2 gimbal. A couple of retailers jumped the gun a little early yesterday, but now, Zhiyun has made it official. It looks a lot like the Weebill S, but it has a neat flippy out full-colour touchscreen LCD and a few other tricks up its sleeve.

As well as the new LCD, the Weebill 2 dumps the 18650 batteries in favour of a built-in battery that you can charge while you’re using it (with USB-PD support!) and features a new Infineon sensor which Zhiyun says improves its overall performance.

[Read More…]

Zhiyun’s new Smooth Q3 gimbal features a built-in rotating LED fill light

by Leave a Comment

If you ever needed more proof that smartphone gimbals were primarily designed for vloggers and social media shooters who want to film themselves or others talking to the camera at short range, then this is probably it. Zhiyun has today announced the new Zhiyun Smooth Q3 smartphone gimbal and this one comes with a built-in LED fill light.

The Smooth Q3 is a 3-axis gimbal, boasting a range of new features over the Smooth Q2, including SmartMode, gesture control, SmartFollow 3.0 Object Tracking, Instant Dolly Zoom, MagicClone Pano and, of course, that built-in LED which can rotate from the front for selfies to the back for filming other people.

[Read More…]

The Zhiyun Crane 2S is a powerful 3-axis gimbal that’s small enough to fit in a backpack

by Leave a Comment

I’m going to open this post with a very subjective, but completely honest, opinion. The Zhiyun Crane 2S (first look review here) instantly became my favourite gimbal as soon as I took it out of the box.  Ever. That’s it. Review over. Ok, not really review over, but it really has become my new go-to gimbal for DSLRs and mirrorless cameras.

The Crane 2S is the followup to Zhiyun’s extremely popular Crane 2 (review here), launched in September 2017. Although already a very capable gimbal, the Crane 2S offers some very noticeable upgrades over its predecessor. So, let’s talk about those.

[Read More…]

The Zhiyun Smooth X is the ideal gimbal to be the centre of attention in your smartphone content

by Leave a Comment

The first smartphone gimbal I ever purchased was a Zhiyun Smooth C back in 2016. Smartphone gimbals have come a long way since then, particularly from Zhiyun. So today we’re going to be taking a look at the Zhiyun Smooth X folding smartphone gimbal.

It’s a 2-axis smartphone gimbal that offers some unique advantages over its competitors in this sector. Of particular note is its small size. This is one of the smallest smartphone gimbals I’ve seen when folded, and easily slips into a pocket. It also has a built-in selfie stick, allowing you to capture more of the scene in the shot when vlogging or travelling.

[Read More…]

Zhiyun shrinks their smartphone gimbal even further with the new Smooth XS

by Leave a Comment

Zhiyun has announced their new Smooth XS gimbal. Like the Smooth X launched earlier in the year, it’s a 2-axis gimbal designed for smartphones, although the Smooth XS is actually even smaller while seemingly offering the same feature set.

The Smooth X offers up to five and a half hours of battery life from its internal battery that charges in three hours. It provides 290° in the pan access and 268° in roll with a payload of up to around 200g. Oh, and there’s an over-the-top launch video that very much signifies who the target market is.

[Read More…]

First Look: Zhiyun updates a legend with the new Zhiyun Crane 2S 3-axis motorised gimbal

by 5 Comments

Zhiyun has today announced an update to their ever-popular Crane 2 gimbal. Not surprisingly, it comes in the form of the Zhiyun Crane 2S. Over the original, it offers increased load capacity, a more extensive camera compatibility list, axis locks, an improved follow focus wheel, larger OLED screen, more shooting modes to match the rest of the gimbals in Zhiyun’s current lineup and greater accessory connectivity.

I’ve had one here to play with for a couple of days so far, and we’ll have a much more extensive review coming in the near future, but here are some of its major features and differences over the original Zhiyun Crane 2.

[Read More…]

The Zhiyun Crane 3S is a big beefy gimbal for big beefy cameras that offers a lot of versatility

by Leave a Comment

The Zhiyun Crane 3S is the latest iteration of Zhiyun’s flagship line of Crane gimbals, traditionally designed for DSLRs and mirrorless cameras. On first glance, the Crane 3S looks a lot like the Crane 3 LAB, but it definitely holds a few extra tricks up its sleeve.

I’ve been using one for a few weeks now when weather and Scotland’s lockdown rules have allowed and I’m going to go over some of those differences and the advantages the Crane 3S has to offer over the Crane 3 LAB.

[Read More…]

How to make your own DIY Arri Trinity for 1/100th of the price

by 7 Comments

For those who’ve never come across it before, the Arri Trinity is an insane $50,000+ (and the camera) gimbal/steadicam hybrid type device that lets you make some really cool and unique shots. We featured it here recently when Potato Jet got to see and try it out for himself and it offers many obvious advantages over other filming techniques.

But most of us don’t have $50k lying around. So, what can we do? Well, we can just make our own. Sort of. In this video, filmmaker James Matthews combines his Zhiyun Weebill S with an old Flycam HD-3000 to produce the “Minity”, letting you get similar shots. Ok, so, it’s not quite the Arri Trinity, but for a hundredth of the budget, what can you really expect?

[Read More…]

The new modular Zhiyun Crane 3S gimbal is built to handle big beefy cameras

by 3 Comments

Zhiyun has just announced their new Zhiyun Crane 3S motorised gimbal, and it’s a bit of a monster. It’s based around the design of the Crane 3 LAB, but the Crane 3S is a very different animal indeed. For a start, the weight capacity has been raised to an impressive 6.5kg, thanks to newly engineered motors. It’s not a replacement model for the Crane 3 LAB, but more a higher capacity version of it.

To account for the bulk of the larger weight capacity, the Crane 3S is also modular, allowing you to reconfigure it in different ways to account for different cameras. It features a whopping nine mounting points, has a couple of removable handles, and comes with an arm extension to handle cameras as large as the Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro G2.

[Read More…]

2019 DIYP Holiday Gift Guide – Tripods, Sliders and Gimbals

by 1 Comment

So far in this year’s DIYP gift guides, we’ve covered cameras, lenses, lights and bags. But whether you shoot stills or video, at some point you’ll likely need something to mount your camera to. So here are some of the new ones that have come out over the last year or so and the ones that we use the most.

[Read More…]

Recent Posts