Super technical photo set-up
As you know, I live in a small apartment with my husband who occasionally works from home, and my lovely three-year-old son. That means I don’t have acres of space to shoot photos for the blog. No spare rooms free of toy bins, scraps of construction paper, and giant pirate floor jigsaw puzzles. I love our apartment, but sometimes it makes me look like a hoarder when I try and take arty photos of a craft project.
I know tripods make all the difference when you’re trying to take crisp photos, but there’s hardly room for one in most places I need to shoot. I do have a beautiful and ancient one I inherited from my father, though it looks like it came straight from the set of The Hour. The other people at the food photography workshop I took kindly did not laugh at it. However, I recently unearthed my Joby Gorillapod from a box. What a genius thing it is! Why did I leave it to languish so long?
It is, essentially, a tabletop tripod. You need room to set it up near your subject. However, the legs are also bendy, so you can wind it around the top of a chair back, the handle of a cupboard or even fold the legs under a bit to make it shorter – making it infinitely more flexible than a traditional tabletop tripod.
Like much photography equipment, tripods can start at a bit more than reasonable price and then run up to infinity. The Gorillapod is an affordable $36 for the SLR version. There are models for compact cameras or even mobile phones. I love this thing.
Disclosure: None! I researched and bought one a couple years back, promptly forgot about it in a box and found it again recently.
