Gitzo 2227 Review

Article and Photographs by: Alain Briot
1-Introduction
How important is your tripod? Very important if you want to maximize depth of field and image sharpness at low speeds with any camera. Crucial if you use a 4x5 view camera. I once forgot to take my tripod on a photography trip to the Grand Canyon (I know, I wonder why I did this too. Mistakes happen...) and learned once and for all that a 4x5 is useless for landscape photography without a tripod. Press photographers in the 40’s may have been able to photograph boxing matches with their Linhof, Graflex or Speed Graphic but they benefited from cammed lenses connected to an operative rangefinder, did not have to cope with depth of field from a few inches to infinity and used flash bulbs instead of relying on sunlight at sunset and sunrise for illumination.
All this to say that I swear by my tripods, care for them, and make sure I have the best ones in duplicate versions just in case. Since 1980 I have only used Gitzo tripods. O...