Rick’s Rants and Raves

Ever since I first learned about kite aerial photography, I realized it was an incredibly difficult thing for me to accomplish–I live in Ohio where the winds swirl in every direction, or they last for about 2 minutes before dieing away to nothingness. Or they gust to 50 mph unpredictably.

Anyway, I soon figured that pole-mounted photography was the way to go, but at the time I didn’t have a camera with a remote release. Well, not long ago, all those memories came flooding back when I saw a DIY tutorial on making a paint pole monopod.

So today, when I went to the hardware store to buy gifts for Laura’s birthday, I decided to pick up the supplies mentioned in that tutorial. In addition to pole mounted photography, I figured I could also use it as a light pole to make shots like this or this or you know, whatever.

So I bought the 30-60″ Shur-line Easy Reach Pole (really awesome extension mechanism!), some 2″ 1/4-20 hangar bolts, and a set of extension poles like that mentioned in the DIY.

When I got it all home, I noticed that the “tag” on the top of the Easy Reach Pole was made of pretty solid plastic. So I cut off the tag part leaving the pole mount threads, drilled a 1/4″ hole through the top of threads part, and put a 1″ 1/4-20 bolt (not the hangar bolt) up through the hole, with a nut on the other end. Sorry, I didn’t take pictures as I did it because I wasn’t sure it would be worth while. Here’s what I’ve got:

So I’ve essentially made myself a pole adapter out of the scrap of the label that was on the pole. Mount an umbrella swivel and flash on the end, and it looks like this:

And if we put it over top of a dorky looking subject, we get something like this:

This is not the fullest extension of the pole. Had I done that, you’d see the floor joists above my head in my basement.

Now, just in the few minutes I played with the adapter to make this shot, I discovered that the bolt tends to swivel a bit which would cause a problem with a flash on the end like I’m demonstrating above. Since I’ve already invested the $6 in the wooden pole extensions and hangar bolts, I’ll probably go ahead and make the more standard (and more rugged, I think) version demonstrated in the DIY.