fbpx

DIY Photography

Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time

Search

Submit A Story

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 5 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…]

Zhiyun has now officially announced the new Weebill-S gimbal

by 3 Comments

Leaks happen all the time, and manufacturers usually ignore them. But when a retailer like B&H drops the news a little early, it often forces their hand. So, Zhiyun has now officially announced the Zhiyun Weebill-S gimbal. A followup to the Weebill LAB, the new Weebill-S comes with 300% more motor torque and 50% response speed increase.

Despite being small, it’s pretty mighty, capable of handling many of the current popular DSLRs and mirrorless cameras along with 24-70mm and 24-105mm zoom lenses. And it can now auto-tune its power to optimise for the load you’ve placed on it.

[Read More…]

B&H leaks the $439 Zhiyun Weebill-S gimbal ahead of official announcement

by 4 Comments

The competition on motorised gimbals these days is pretty intense. They didn’t even really exist a few years ago, except for small devices like phones, action cameras, and drones, but now there are a number of companies producing some solid piece of gear. And these companies are generally pretty secretive about new releases, right up until they’re ready to announce them.

One of the biggest names in gimbals is Zhiyun, who was pretty much an instant hit since they introduced their first Zhiyun Crane back in 2016, and they’ve been going from strength to strength ever since. It turns out they had a new gimbal on the way, the Weebill-S, but B&H broke the secrecy and leaked it ahead of their own official announcement.

[Read More…]

How To perfectly balance a Black Magic 4k on a Zhiyun Crane 2

by Leave a Comment

This is about ten-minute read where we dive into all the dos and dons approaching a gimbal and balancing. If you’re interested in how to balance your gimbal as fast as possible jump to the actual balance process section towards the end.

When the P4K first hit customers hands, there was a borderline backlash in the forums. Proud owners of their new camera were disappointed to find out they couldn’t mount their cameras onto their Crane 2 gimbals. At first glance, it seems borderline irrelevant to even want to balance such a powerful camera on a gimbal that has been updated already to its big brother, the Crane Lab 3, but there are a lot of advantages to being able to take up less space and carry less weight (especially if you don’t need the extra weight).

[Read More…]

The Zhiyun Smooth Q2 and Crane M2 are small but mighty little gimbals

by 2 Comments

Zhiyun has given us no shortage of new gimbal releases over the last year or so. The Crane 3 LAB and Weebill lab have both been big hits. But now Zhiyun is focusing on the smaller things in life with the new Crane M2 and Smooth Q2 gimbals for small compact cameras and smartphones. We had the opportunity to chat with Zhiyun at IBC 2019 and find out more about them.

[Read More…]

Recent Posts