I love to build stuff. So once I started getting more and more of an itch to have a slider, I thought to myself. “Why don’t I just build one?” Wanting to do it on a budget under $25, I went to home depot and picked up all the parts I needed.
Parts list for my 2′ slider
Total $24.19
I accomplished my goal of building it for under $25…barely. Now remember, this price doesn’t include the price of a tripod. I already have the Travel friendly Manfrotto 7301YB so I didn’t have to worry about buying that.
I wanted the ease of having a release plate that I could bolt onto the bottom of the slider. This way I could quickly throw the slider on the tripod. To make this as friendly as possible, I wanted another tripod head to throw onto the slider that accepted the same Manfrotto quick release I already had (from buying aforementioned Manfrotto tripod). This way, I wouldn’t have to change out the plate from the camera. I could remove the camera, throw the slider on, then put the camera on the head mounted to the slider. Bam, bam, and bam.
I went ahead and purchased another Manfrotto 391RC 2 Junior head to stick on the slider. This is the current head that is on my tripod and whilst it’s not the greatest compared to a nice fluid head, it does the job!
The tripod head won’t be here until this Thursday, but that will give me time to give the slider a slick coat of paint and get ‘er all ready to go. Once everything is polished, painted, and finished up, I’ll do a more in-depth video along with some example footage.
For now, here’s a quicky I made after finishing the initial setup. I just set my T2i on the slider plate for the test shots since everything is not 100% put together yet.
I still need to do A LOT more practice time lapses with HDR and aperture priority to make sure I can get a good day to night transition.
