Using UniqBall Tripod Head for Outdoor Photography

Hi, this is Ian Plant with "Outdoor Photography Guide" and today I'm gonna review a piece of equipment that always finds its way in my camera bag, the UniqBall 45XC Ball Head. This unique design, which combines two ball heads in one, is perfect for all your photography needs. What's interesting about the UniqBall design is that it combines two ball heads into one unit. The outer ball can be used as a conventional ball head or it can be used as a leveling base for the inner ball which then becomes a pan-and-tilt unit. The outer ball, which is also the leveling base, has an integrated spirit level which allows you to level the ball head.

This is what I do first after I set up my tripod and I'm ready to shoot. Once I get that perfectly level, then I can put the camera onto the inner ball. I'm attaching it to the clamp here and then this little red knob, once I loosen it, allows me to pan left or right and tilt the camera up and down. No matter where I move the camera at this point, the horizon is always gonna be perfectly level. As you can see, even though the UniqBall is relatively lightweight, it's a very sturdy head.

It can support even the biggest, heaviest super telephoto lenses. And once you have the leveling base set up, when you loosen the red knob, you can pan and tilt in any direction. So this operates very similar to a gimbal head, which is used specifically for wildlife photography. So once you've got this set up, you can pan and tilt. Your horizon's always gonna stay level so you can work with moving subjects.

So as you can see, the movement back and forth, up and down is very fluid. I find that the performance of the UniqBall is almost as good as a very high-quality gimbal head for wildlife photography, and you can even adjust the tension a little bit by tightening the red knob there, so you can adjust the tension to suit your particular taste. One key difference from a gimbal head though is that it's not perfectly balanced. With a gimbal head, you could just leave your camera angled down or up and walk away and not have to worry about it. With this head, if you let go, the whole thing will fall over and you wanna avoid that because it might take your whole tripod over and ruin your expensive camera and lens.

So you wanna make sure that if you were going to take your hands off the camera that you tighten the red knob before you do so. The primary reason for the design of the UniqBall is to allow the photographer to easily take panoramic photos. So once you have the base leveled, you can loosen the red knob and you can pan the camera in one direction, taking a series of photos that you can later stitch together on the computer to create a panoramic-format image. So what's my bottom line about the UniqBall? I really like this product.

I think it's a really great ball head, and what I love about it is the fact that I can use it both for my landscape photography and wildlife photography. It's one size fits all. It's great because that way if I'm going on a trip where I'm doing mixed photography, I don't have to bring a separate ball head for the landscape and a gimbal head for the wildlife. Now, there are a few things that I think could be done better. For example, I wish that the tension on the leveling base was a bit tighter.

It can be difficult sometimes getting the whole system leveled, especially when you have a heavy camera lens combo on top of the ball head. Second of all, and this may be a problem for only some people, is the price. The UniqBall comes in at about $600 U.S., which is a little bit higher than the average ball head. However, it's not more expensive than a quality gimbal head and it's certainly less expensive than if you buy a separate ball head and a separate gimbal head. So overall, I think this is a very useful product.

I find that I'm using it all the time. It's perfect to meet all of my photography needs.