Physical shutter or electronic?

Gorgeous!

Try on Valleret before you buy - they don't accept returns and I found the thumbs and index fingers ridiculously long. The caps flop open at the slightest provocation - no good at all if you have to use your hands for anything but putting the caps back in place and even that is frustrating. The Heat liner gloves are quite good, though the fingertips are just a little long and fat for me to use the OK button and joystick array on my OMD-EM1. Alone they aren't adequate for long if it's much below freezing, but warmer and tougher than a lot of liners I've tried and they have a handwarmer pocket . There are a number of good shells and heavy mitts - just take care to not drag snow into them or let them dangle so snow can fall into them. Costco sometimes has Head glove liners that are a good value and seem to fit my hands well - not so warm but enough for a lot of purposes.

Good job! Where did you take these?

Can you make multiple, dated images (onto a large enough disk) to allow you to rebuild from a version saved prior to a malware attack?

THanks!

A couple shots of some simple ironwork, a shoreline and "cracked", all submittals for a Ricky Tims Critique Group last year.

Pieces of fulgurite?

If you liked that heron, you'll love this one, from a paddling outing on the Yakima River behind our house.

A few shots of unusual critters near Gleneden Beach, OR from an August visit. A Turkey Vulture, a malodorous Gray Whale carcass, and a very skeptical Great Blue Heron.

First thing I noticed. I'd guess they used the dished wheels so the hubs would be less likely to snag on things like trees when they were towing the pieces around in a hurry. Also - the offset maximizes the lateral stability for a given overall width.

A level on/in the camera is fine for one shot but doesn't help much for panning on a tripod. It tells you that the camera is level, but if the tripod column (or platform) isn't plumb, the axis of rotation will not be plumb and the axis of the lens will not remain constant with respect to level as the camera is rotated. You need a vertical axis of rotation somewhere between the tripod feet and the camera. This could, practically, be at the bottom of the camera or at the bottom of the tripod head. . You can manually level the camera before each exposure if the scene is static and you can work with the camera aimed level or figure out how to aim it up/down consistently, but it's kind of fussy and time-consuming, especially with a ball-head. You don't need the axis of rotation to be perfectly plumb for a wide landscape pan, but the closer it is to plumb the less of your image will have to be cropped away to leave a level horizon. Photo-merging software is pretty powerful, but it has limits. Warping or distorting a stitched pan before cropping can sometimes save an image, but it's better to just shoot it right.
If your scene has subject elements near the camera, you will need to find the "entrance pupil" location of your lens (ref. https://web.archive.org/web/20080407174910/http://doug.kerr.home.att.net/pumpkin/Pivot_Point.pdf) and mount the camera to locate that point as close to the axis of rotation as you can, to avoid parallax error. If everything is quite distant this error will be insignificant.

I have been working on the same sort of problem lately, and came up with this inexpensive gadget. It's a freebie spirit level that came with a print or something from Adorama and has been lurking in my toolbag recently. I fabricated a bracket for it out of a piece of aluminum flat bar, boring a 3/8" hole for the tripod head mounting screw and machining a slight dado on the face (rather unnecessary embellishment) to help prevent the level from getting knocked loose. I mounted the level to the bracket with some double-stick tape to try it out - when that fails I'll either get better tape or use a dab of RTV silicone.

I have to loosen the head maybe 0.05 turn on the mounting stud to rotate the level bracket on the column. It would be more convenient if it could rotate independently, but I don't see a simple way to do that yet. One must take care not to let the head come unscrewed in any case, and a leveler spinning freely might provide some warning. Not sure if that's a feature ....

To plumb the column, I align the level roughly with two feet of the tripod and adjust them to level so the column is plumb with respect to that axis, then turn the bracket on the column to align with either of the other pairs of feet and adjust the third leg to level it that way and it's done. If it's really critical one could repeat the two adjustments or check all three orientations, but if you are careful the first time it will be as right as a free level can make it.

So far it has worked quite well - a great value for the modest investment of perhaps 40 minutes and some scrap metal. It's compact enough to (just) fit between the stowed legs of my MeFoto C1350 tripod where it is fairly well protected, and weighs only a few grams. I'd have preferred to install it with the level on top, but it's a little too tall to clear the lock knobs on the head. Somebody with a mill could probably make a much refined version using a little smaller spirit level. If you do, please send me one. If you'd like a design collaborator, let me know.

(Download)

Nice photos! I appreciate that they aren't overprocessed - the colors look natural and realistic. That may seem a strange compliment, but anymore it seems that restraint is an endangered virtue.

Continuous autofocus can compensate for camera movement in the axial direction as long as the movement isn't too fast for the focusing system and you aren't hard up against the minimum focal distance. A tripod and a still subject is better, and focus stacking extends the range of possibility at the expense of either expensive in-camera processing (and, in the case of my OMD-E-M1 bodies, only a jpeg to show for it) or costly and time-consuming post-processing. Done well, stacking is a marvelous technology! You must have a still subject and camera (or a rail-mount axial camera motion system) to give it a chance to excel, though.