tripod

You're not a photographer if you haven't been somewhere (traveling light on a weekend excursion perhaps) when out for an evening stroll you spot it... the picture you thought you wouldn't need to take this weekend: a long exposure.

Here's a simple tip that could come in handy: put a metal washer on your keychain for the purpose of tightening your tripod quick release plate.

Here's a recent episode from the Science Channel's show How It's Made that shows how modern camera tripods are manufactured. We get a tour of a Manfrotto tripod factory, starting from when aluminum tubes are sliced to specific lengths by precise machines and up through when tubes are joined through custom housings by hand.

I've been doing increasingly more portraiture outdoors over the years and most often have been relying on speedlights for their small size and portability. One problem I always faced was choosing a stand to use for supporting the speedlight.

YouTube woodworking guru Matthias Wandel just posted this video about how he recently discovered that he can use his tripod as a simple DIY camera stabilizer for some casual filming. After doing some experiments with a DIY glidecam system, Wandel found that he actually got the smoothest shots by simply pointing the legs of his big and heavy Manfrotto tripod out and running around with his camera attached to it.

If you constantly move your camera from one device to another in the course of your work, you may have experienced the annoyance and inconvenience of different manufacturers offering different plate designs. What they generally have in common, however, is the same standard tripod screw. The folks at Edelkrone used this fact to create the QuickReleaseONE, which the company claims is the world's first universal quick release for switching between plates.

Tripods are often designed for stability rather than ease of use, which can make operating them a slow and complicated process. Traditional tripods are also often difficult to set up with one hand.

The London-based product designer who goes by the name Product Tank decided to try his hand at inventing a tripod that's friendlier to use. What he came up with is this clever prototype that can easily be expanded, adjusted, and collapsed with a single hand.

Yesterday, LumoPro released the LightSwitch: a flash case with the ability to morph into three different light modifiers. Continuing on the theme of "multi-purpose gear," the company has also just launched the new LumoPro LP605M light stand, which boasts the ability to convert into a monopod whenever needed. Standing at 7.5-feet-tall, the LP605M is aimed at location photographers looking to lighten their load while on the move.

The AmazonBasics 60-Inch Lightweight Tripod is a $24 tripod that's the #1 bestseller over on Amazon. The #1 review on that tripod is the 8-minute video above, submitted by a man named Michael Trimble.

"As you can see I have no arms so I need a tripod that is lightweight but full on perks," Trimble his writes. "This tripod is EVERYTHING I hoped for & then some!"

There are now a number of smartphone tripods out there that are designed to fit inside your wallet when not in use. Before you buy one, though, here's a random little tip: if your wallet is thick and sturdy enough, you don't even need a separate accessory -- your wallet itself can do just fine.

When you're shooting on-location, you often want to pack as light as possible to minimize the physical effort needed to set things up. Just one problem: you're probably going to need to carry around big, cumbersome sandbags in order to hold down all that ultra-light gear you packed.

Here to change the game is WaterWeight, a creative reinvention of the sandbag by the folks at Inspired Photo Gear. Small, portable and versatile, these little beasts ensure that your lights will be staying right where you need them without weighing you down on the way to the shoot.

For photographers who are constantly switching between using a shoulder strap and monopod or tripod, Steadsnap might just be the product you’ve been waiting for. It’s a small adapter that mounts to the bottom of your camera and allows you to connect both a mounting plate and sling strap at the same time.

There are times when all you need to capture the perfect photograph is just a few more feet in height. A common technique is to carry around and use a ladder to stand on and snap the needed photograph. But a ladder is far from convenient in terms of weight in size.

Thankfully, there’s an alternative that’s far smaller and not overly cost-prohibitive. It’s often called a construction tripod, laser tripod or contractors tripod and it’s a much smaller, more convenient way to get your camera high up in the sky.

There are some strange Kickstarter ideas out there, and the Heirloom is one of them. Akin to the tomato needle holder you probably saw at your grandmother’s house as a child, the Heirloom is actually a small, weighted, table-top tripod replacement.

When it comes to stabilizing your camera on the go, there are quite a few options out there. However, they tend to come at the cost of size or price, neither of which is appealing to many. That's where the DIY "Stringpod" will help you.

The folks at Custom SLR are in the holiday spirit, there's no doubt about that. After all, why else would you take on the pointless (but awesome) task of creating the world's largest camera tripod Christmas tree?

If versatility is the name of the game, then the Lollipod is doing its best to win that game. A new product currently making the press rounds, the Lollipod combines the functionality of a tripod, monopod, boom, lighting stand and selfie stand into an extremely portable and easy-to-use package that will come in handy in a slew of different situations.

Sick of carrying your tripod separately from your camera backpack? If you have certain types of backpacks, you can add your own strap loop system to the bottom to serve as a makeshift tripod carrying feature.

Are you the type of person who enjoys using things built using your own two hands? 20-year-old Croatian tinkerer CroBuilder is like that too. He recently spent 10 hours in his workshop building a camera tripod from scratch.

You can quit squinting your eyes and holding your hats, folks. That's not a UFO coming in for a landing, it's Manfrotto's brand-spanking-new Pixi tripod. It's designed for smartphones and smaller cameras, and did we mention that's it's so tiny and cute? Oh yes it is!

When the first Capture Camera Clip went to Kickstarter in 2011, it absolutely blew away its funding goal. Creator Peter Dering needed $10,000; he wound up raising almost $365,000! The last two years have been very kind to the versatile camera clip that allows you to securely hook your DSLR just about anywhere on your person, but along with the success have come many suggestions for possible improvement.

So, like any good designer, Dering is taking another stab at it: attempting the same idea, only this time with "brilliant execution." The v2 is a redesigned, sleeker, better version of the first Capture system, with a bunch of new functionality built in.

What kind of invention gets Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak excited? The simple kind. That's what got Woz to not only notice the credit card-sized Pocket Tripod, but feel so strongly about it he took to the Internet to sing its praises.

With the ability to shoot video now nearly ubiquitous among DSLRs, many photographers take advantage and switch into video mode on occasion. But because video isn't a photographer's first priority, camera sliders and cranes that many videographers find necessary for beautiful, smooth tracking shots don't always make the budget.

Thankfully, if you're not in the market for a slider or crane, but you still want to shoot the occasional tracking shot, the folks at DSLR filmmaking tutorial site Fenchel & Janisch shared this simple trick for getting similar results using the tripod already at your disposal.

About a month ago, we shared a Kickstarter for something called the Fusion Plate. The product made it easy to go from using a sling-style strap -- something many photographers prefer to the traditional -- to using a tripod without having to mess with screwing anything in.

The Fusion Plate has since far-surpassed its funding goal, but if you didn't get a chance to buy one of those, or if the $65 price tag was just a little out of reach, the folks at JOBY have announced a more affordable alternative.

For those of you who often take pictures with your smartphone, but find that you never have a stand or tripod with you when you need one, here's a creative Kickstarter that may solve that problem. Called KeyProp, this ingenious little key shaped smartphone stand fits on your key chain so you always have it with you -- and it comes with a free camera timer/clap-to-snap app to boot.

About a year and a half ago, photographer David Fliger of Fusion Photo Gear found himself in a field, rushing to mount his camera onto a tripod in order to get a shot of a tractor in the fading light. There was only one problem: he already had his sling-style shoulder strap attached via the accessory loop that was sitting where his quick release plate would normally be.

It was a problem he ran into all too often (both used the 1/4" accessory hole on the bottom of his camera) and one he made up his mind that day that he would solve. That's when the Fusion Plate was born.

This will probably be of limited interest to most of you, but we like to know how things work, not just how well they work. We thought we’d take a couple of pictures when we disassembled a ballhead in case any of you were interested. Our demonstration partner today was a Benro B1 ballhead that had a stripped tension adjustment knob, but all ballheads work basically the same way.

Cinetics, the people who brought you the CineSquid and CineSkates, introduced their newest alteration to a GorillaPod this last week, the CineVise. While the CineSquid enhanced your GorillaPod's legs with powerful suction cups, and the CineSkates put your camera on wheels, the CineVise (quite literally) clamps your camera onto any clamp-able surface you may need to secure it to.

As more and more consumers use their smartphones as their primary camera, camera gear manufacturers have been brainstorming new products designed to mount phones to camera tripods. Universal mounts to this point have largely been focused on ways of gripping the phone securely. The JackPod is a new stupidly simple answer to how to get phones mounted to tripods: it uses the standard headphone jack found on pretty much every smartphone on the market.