Berlebach 3032 Wood Tripod Legs with Levelling Ball - Supports 26.5 lb (12.0 kg)

Berlebach has been manufacturing beautifully-finished pieces of German craftsmanship for over a century, and then as now the natural advantages of wood continually appeal to discriminating shooters.  Handling wooden tripods in temperature extremes is quite a different experience than that of a metal or even carbon fiber tripods.  Wood just seems not to care.

But despite wood's impervious nature to temperature and its general asthetic appeal, the best reason to choose wood over other materials for tripods is its incredible capacity to absorb vibration.  Wood simply does not resonate as as other materials.  A wooden tripod placed in a shallow stream may be vibrating quite a bit where the legs meet the water, but up at the column it is dead as a doornail.  Putting a laser pointer on top of a metal, carbon fiber and wood tripod and shaking the legs of each clearly displays the advantage.  The laser pointer's beam upon the wood tripod will have come to a rest much quicker than the others, and additionally its resonating disturbances will be smaller as well.  This will assuredly show up in your pictures!

The 3032 is an ideal choice for a large format shooter. Foregoing a center column to save precious amounts of weight, it instead has an incorporated levelling ball with a bubble level.  This provides 30° of quick correction in all directions, and combined with the independent leg spread this is likely all you'll ever need for a large format camera.  The 1/4"-20 threaded camera screw is spring-loaded to naturally push up at all times, which is so fast and intuitive to use that most quick release mechanisms won't save you any time at all versus it:  it is actually quicker than the popular vise-like Arca-type quick release mechanism.  Just place your camera on the support platform, move it around until you feel the spring-loaded tripod screw push into the camera's tripod socket, then turn the screw clockwise from underneath the ball.  The progressive tension of the ball permits settings which allow you to move the camera, but the camera will not move upon its own, even when the levelling ball has not been tightened further.