Equipment - Custom lens adapter plates
Saturday, 13 March 2010 10:42 | 
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The Canon EF500 f/4L IS comes equiped with a rather bulky tripod foot. To use the lens on a tripod you need to buy a separate lens plate which fits your ball head. I use a Wimberley Sidekick with both my EF300 f/2.8L IS and my EF500 f/4L IS. The combination of standard tripod foot and Wimberly P30 lens plate on the 300mm work like a charm in combination with the Sidekick, but with the 500mm I found that the rotational stability with the standard tripod foot and Wimberley P40 lens plate wasn't quite right. With this combination the center of the lens is to far right of the center of the ballhead that the Sidekick is connected to (in my case an Arca Swiss B1).
To fix the rotational stability I purchased a CP-51 custom lens adapter plate for the Canon 500/4 IS Lens. This plate has an integrated double dovetail Arca-Swiss style plate, and it's lighter in weight than Canon foot combined with a lens plate. The possible overall savings is about .75 pounds. This is useful for luggage weight restrictions during travel. The closer mount also saves space when packing, yet leaves enough room to use the lens foot as a handle. Due to lower mounting the rotational stability when used with the Wimberley Sidekick improves noticeably. The replacement lens plate includes a wrench for foot removal plus wrench and stop screws for the replacement foot.
The replacement foot fits snugly inside the hood if the hood is reversed on the lens. This means the replacement foot is protected, but more importantly it means that the maximum width of the EF500 is reduced to the width of the hood which is 14,6cm. This helps a lot if you're transporting the lens in a backpack like I do a lot.
I highly recommend the CP-51 lens foot replacement with the EF500 f/4L IS. If you own this lens and use a tripod system that uses the Arca-Swiss style plate then buy this lens foot replacement! I purchased my CP-51 from NatureScapes.
Replacement foot for Canon EF500 f/4L IS
