My dear friend Brian at
www.berkeysystem.com has since last year helped me solve many things when it comes to putting a rig together. One of the best things about his Berkey system parts is you can reassemble them into something new. They never go out of style or use. Come up with a new idea and you can put it together. This is so great and during this last year I've collected a small toolbox with parts from Berkey. This time I wanted to built a new compact and uncomplicated rig for shoulder use on either my Canon 5DmkII or my Panasonic AF101.
I wanted to mount the camera with most of the weight resting on the shoulder rather than having the camera in front of me. That would just have made it front heavy and I'd have to use an additional weight on the back. Not what I wanted to do, adding more weight.
Because the way I wanted the camera to rest I couldn't use the built in EVF or the LCD screen. I've just got a
Zacuto EVF flip and already have a Z-finder and when I got the EVF I had a shoulder rig in mind. These two makes it possible to put something together that's workable and to monitor what you're shooting. I also wanted to make one rig that can be used for tripod mount, with rods and the whole setup of mattebox and follow focus, or use it as a shoulder rig.
I still have to fine tune it and add a better HDMI cable solution to avoid cable clutter but as it is right now it does meet my design ideas. It's small, uncomplicated, compact and can be configured pretty much any way one could possible want. Thanks to the excellent Berkey system parts.
A small articulation arm holds the EVF and it's screwed into a Berkey rod block. When not used or when transporting, you remove the camera and EVF and fold the handlebar so it becomes flat. Everything is adjustable. I even tried to put my
Manfrotto 521PFI focus controller on one of the rods and with something like the Olympus 14-35 lens or any other micro 4/3 lens you can pull focus and adjust iris on the fly without moving you hand. With manual lenses, like the
Voigtländer 75/1.8 mounted in these images, you have to adjust it directly by hand but even that proved to be comfortable.