I bought the pod because there will be times when I want to take something up close / I don’t have an even surface and it will give me something to rest against. So far in the garden testing it has enabled the camera to sit atop a pole, on branches and on a picket fence. The grass was damp down the bottom of the garden and it provided a good base there too. Nice.
I also bought a Gorillapod SLR Zoom. I wanted some sort of tripod but nothing big and shiny. I tested it with a Tamron AF70-300 and it holds that with no real problem. Taking that too into the garden it will wrap (this is with the Canon 50mm) around a steel pole quite happily, around the same picket fence, around a branch - you get the idea. And because it is plastic there are no worries about water / dirt. This weekend I plan on a long walk with Winston and I’ll take both along and see how they work out.
What using both showed though was the tremor I have. Even wrapped around a pole tightly I could not stop the tremor bouncing the image as I depressed the shutter button. So off to ebay I went and I’ve bought a remote control. This will also be really useful when I try and get some pictures of the foxes that visit each night (they take food from J’s hand now) and of course I can get much better setup shots.
There are a couple of pics here.
(Pod was 15 quid from Jessops, Gorillapod 32 inc postage from ebay and the Remote is 15 from ebay. The Gorillapod has Jessop’s cheapest ball and socket head attached - it was 7 quid.)
5 Comments
Looks liek good sturdy stuff, thinking of visiting the shops at the weekend (if R lets me…)
Thank you again for the stuff!!!
They make wee ones as well… I’ve always found it handy to have a little tripod hanging around my SLR, it works great with my hand-sized digital.
What about the flash? That little pop-up one on the camera is crap for bouncing flash off a ceiling to give some fill behind a subject, or really pretty much anything other than making people’s colour wash away… trust me, the proper flash gives you options the pop-up never will.
Gabriel - right now I know just about nothing about when / how to use a flash properly and how it can be used in daylight too. So I’d rather reach the limitations of the default flash and know another would improve things first.
I know it will help, I just need to play and learn first.
Get yourself a large (A4 or A3) piece of white card.
When the flash goes off on the camera, think of it goig forward and then with the help of the white card, bounce it to the area of the object you want to light up.
Oh, R said I could have a pod :-) It’s sitting on the table in front of me!!
An old-school trick is to take a small piece of toilet tissue and tape it over a built in flash.
This diffuses the light output and increases quality dramatically.
Non-diffused flash is harsh and doesn’t wrap around subject matter. It also causes color inaccuracies. So a little tissue or even cookie paper will help.
Try it and see how much better colors, skin tones, and details come out. It alone can increase the quality of your default flash photographs.
PS- photography has been my Zen-thing since I was 12 yrs old. My Grandmother was a portrait photographer for fifty years.
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