Gorillapod SLR-Zoom

Several people have asked how the Gorillapod worked out on my recent trip to Chile and Peru, and my answer is that it performed great… in exactly the way I expected it to.

I shoot a Nikon D300. The metal chassis on this camera means that it’s a bit on the heavy side. Add to that a Nikon 18-200mm zoom lens, and you’re working with a bit of a bulky package. Under this amount of strain, the Gorillapod (GP) will actually collapse on itself. As you can see in the photo, I started wrapping the GP around my camera bag in order to secure it. The GP is less a tripod in this scenario, than it is a means to attach my Manfrotto 486RC2 compact ball head to a stable surface.

Why not just use a sandbag or sweater? Precision. I’m not a tripod shooter, and knew that I only wanted the GP for low-light and night sky situations, but even in these situations, I wanted to be able to easily point my camera where I wanted it to face. I’ve had moderate success propping the camera up with a jacket in the past, but the GP and camera bag (or rock, or other rounded surface) allowed me to swing my camera in many different directions without rejigging the prop. While not perfectly stable, and being susceptible to shifting with the 18-200mm racked all the way out, it gave my just enough precision and stability to get the shots I wanted. The added weight in my bag was negligible when compared to the benefits of the Gorillapod, and the GP did spend most of its time in my backpack, rather than in my camera bag.

If you need great stability and don’t care for finessing your setup, you should likely bring a full tripod. If you’re not too concerned about taking longer exposures and think you’ll be able to manage by propping on your bag or spare sweater, then skip the Gorillapod.

Interesting to note: A Gorillapod with ball head looks like a grenade to some security X-Ray techs. They ran my pack back and forth several times and were becoming rather agitated until I told them I had some weird stuff in there. The woman who opened my bag in Vancouver kept saying “it looks like something very serious for us” before admitting quietly that it resembled a grenade.