Tripods - What's the lowdown on one of these?

[informer]

I posted a thread earlier about taking panorama pictures, and I think I would need a tripod for that.

I'm an absolute newbie so after looking at a list of tripods, its kind of beyond me. Some of them are $50, some are $500.

To do a good panorama capture, I would need to take portrait shots rather than landscape shot is that correct? That means that the tripod would need to tilt to take portraits, do all tripods do this?

Thanks again for your suggestions.

[MCWB]

You can use an L-bracket to mount your camera on your head in portrait mode.

In terms of tripods, the main choice is aluminium vs carbon fibre (budget vs weight). CF starts with the Feisol offerings at around $300, and heads rapidly north from there. Aluminium can be had for less, but is heavier. Then you'll want some sort of head to go between the tripod and the camera, which will enable you to change the orientation of the camera without having to move the legs. Manfrotto are popular in the lower budget range (<$200); the high-end ones use the Arca-Swiss system and are priced around US$500 including quick-release plates.

There should be plenty of good info on both tripods and heads here, so search around and enjoy.

[SoCal Steve]

informer -
The reasoning behind an L bracket is that to take an accurate panorama you want to rotate the camera on the lens axis and not the tripod screw axis on the bottom of the camera body. Hence the need to offset the camera position with an L bracket to get this alignment correct.