As I was reading a recent posting by Ned Bunnell, on how it is best not to “cheap-out” on buying proper support for your camera, I kept thinking to myself that his warnings were all too true. I find myself in the situation he warns against.

A couple years ago I ran out a bought a cheap tripod at Circuit City. Partly it was a desire to buy one quickly, but I also chose to spend as little as possible. It seemed like a decent enough tripod, and in theory its weigh rating would be plenty to support my camera. Unfortunately, although I spent a good long time carefully researching and considering my camera purchase, I didn’t even give the tripod five minutes.

Over the past couple of years I have used my tripod a few times, but it mostly collects dust. This state is not from a lack of situations where it would be nice to have proper support, but rather due to a number of technical faults limiting the tripod’s utility. Some of the faults have arisen as my lens collection skewed towards heavy premier glass. Others are simply a matter of cheap construction and bad design.

The bottom line is that I went cheap and got what I paid for. I now need a new support system. Unfortunately, unlike camera bodies and lenses, there is a dearth of detailed head and leg reviews. I have seen a few recommendations, but it would be nice to actually read detailed pros and cons. Even better would be to talk to someone with experience. Alas, Lansing doesn’t really have a camera shop anymore (that I know of).

P.S. – If you are interested in photography, and especially if you are Pentaxian, I highly recommend Ned Bunnell’s blog. He is the president of Pentax USA and an avid photographer. As such he has some great comments and, of course, great photos.

This photo was taken this past fall and had what I thought to be a nice composition. The colors were, however unremarkable, except for the windows on the crosswalk. Since I recently upgraded to Aperture 3.0, I decided to play around with the new brushed filters. A few brush strokes and a number of tweaks to the B+W filter and the color, and voila. Perhaps not the most stunning color isolation, but I think it worked well.