I'm Pete Marshall, and here's the story of a family of products developed to help leverage the recent advances in camera and lens technology, particularly in autofocus performance.
I've spent much of my life designing and manufacturing things; from Campervans and pick up canopies in Australia, to restoring old buildings, classic cars and antiques in England. Alongside these activities, has always run my love of photography. At first, recording a growing family, then countless product shots of whatever I happened to be making.
In UK I was drawn at first to the beautiful landscapes and ancient buildings with which Britain is richly endowed. More recently, my interest shifted to wildlife and bird photography in particular. While perched birds were fine for a while, they looked so much better in their natural element, the air.
Trouble was, neither I or any of my friends had much success photographing birds in flight. We'd maybe take pictures of Buzzards or Kites..... as distant specks slowly crossing the sky, but detailed close ups of fast moving birds and insects were off the menu.
This would change, quite by accident. A new 100-400mm had just arrived and I was keen to try it, but an arm injury the day before made the camera and lens were way too painful to lift.
Healing time for the arm...a frustrating 6 weeks so no playing with the new toy for a while!
Then an idea! There was some aluminium bar in the workshop. With camera and lens mounted on the bar, and the bar laid over my shoulder, maybe my arm would be ok. I screwed a crude pistol grip under the front of the bar and a crude shoulder pad under the rear, mounted the camera and 100-400mm lens, and there, before me, was a crude but surprisingly effective Camera Carrier. I was pleasantly surprised, to find that my larger and heavier Sony 200-600mm also felt comfortable on this rig.
Camera Carrier No 1.
With this simple contraption, tracking birds and insects in the sky, became much easier but although the hit rate was rising, it was still difficult to capture and hold a bird in the viewfinder, without being able to see the surrounding sky. At this point, I remembered an old "Starfinder" red dot sight, that had been so useful, on my astronomical telescope. Clearly it was too big for a camera, but I soon found a basic reflex sight which I stuck to the camera with a wad of blue tac....primitive, but with the sight even roughly collimated, the results were remarkable. As long as I held the red dot on the target, the target would remain in the viewfinder, and there'd be an image stream!
The dedicated Hot shoe sight mount
I went on to machine many more, increasingly sophisticated Camera carriers, cam grips and sight mounts...large and small, the results continued to improve until one day, a friend, using the kit to shoot birds in flight for the first time, commented, that the process was "Almost too easy".
Not long after, it became clear to me, that the product family had finally reached maturity and was ready for production. I had a local and highly regarded firm of machinists in mind for the job, and now the family of products is in production.
