Rick’s Rants and Raves

For my birthday this year, my dad bought me a travel tripod for my cameras. Unfortunately, I didn’t trust the tripod enough to put a camera on it, because the legs were flimsy and don’t have a good locking mechanism. They’re only slightly better than a collapsible radio antenna. My dad had cut part of the packaging off, evidently so that I couldn’t see the price tag, so that ruled out returning it.

Aside from the legs however, I like the head on the tripod. So I took the legs off and started trying to think of what I could do with just the head. One possibility was to make my own shock-corded legs out of copper pipe sections. That could have worked really well, but I probably would have spent as much on copper as the tripod cost in the first place. My next idea was to mount the head on a tree-trimmer so that I could do pole-mounted photography. Perhaps I could attach the head to some camp webbing with a buckle so that I could mount it to a tree.

Then I remembered a previous gift from my father: a portable work light that came with a detachable clamp. I’ve used the light a couple of times, but never the clamp. As it turns out, the bolt from the head of the tripod fit the threads on the mounting bracket of the clamp.

The result is a very strong spring clamp with a 3-way tripod head attached.

I’ve tried it with my lighter camera in all kinds of orientations, and it seems solid so far. I’m not sure if I’ll feel comfortable putting my DSLR with 300mm lens on it.

So now that I’ve got it, hopefully some creative ideas will start to surface where I can make use of it. The best one I’ve got so far is to clamp a camera near the ceiling of my front porch to take pictures of trick-or-treaters as I attempt to scare them.