Hi I'm Doug McKinlayand you're watching
AdoramaTV. In today's episode I'm going to look at a
away for photographers to save a buck
or two.
For those of you into the photographic arts you know how expensive
it is. In fact I’d call it a money pit but
there are ways to save some money by
doing a little DIY (do-it-yourself).
So today I'm going to build a ground pod
out of bits and bobs I’ve found around the
kitchen and in the garden shed. The ground
pod is a camera support primarily used
by wildlife photographers to get an
inside you the subjects. Now these are
commercially available in fact Adorama
sells a good one but with a little bit of foresight of
ingenuity you can build your own for about 10
bucks. So just before we get started
here's what we'll need. A marker pen,
a straight edge which can be a ruler in
this case it's a little level. A Philips
head screwdriver, a one inch hex head
bolt threaded for your tripod head. An old
frying pan, I do stress an old frying pan.
A tripod head, a set of allen keys, a drill.
Some drill bits,
and an old shoe lace. So let's get
started.
So the first thing I'm going to do is find the
center of the pan. The backside of the
pan and that's where your straight edge
and your marker pen come into play.
So the next step is taking your drill and a
small drill bit, to drill a pilot hole in
the bottom of your pan in order to guide
your bigger drill bit that should be the
size of your bolt.
Now from there
what we've got to do next is find the
correct
drillbit the size of our bolt. Now this
is simple, I got a whole set of bits here.
I'm just going to grab the one that
corresponds to it by checking the
thickness.
That looks about right.
So once again, we mount it into our drill. Tighten up the chuck key
You might have to put a bit of weight into
this one. Make sure you're holding the
pan so it doesn't skip out underneath
and drill away.
Pretty straightforward. Once you've got
your primary hole drilled, take your bolt
and check to see if it fits. Just like that.
We flip it over, you see it sticking
through the bottom of the pan. We're
almost there.
The next step with this pan is to get
rid of the handle.
Now there's no rule to say you have to
get rid of handle but I just think it
looks a little funny with the handle on
it. So it is your choice ether get rid of it
or keep it. So we take a phillips-head
screwdriver and we undo the bolt.
So that's almost it. It's that simple.
Now the single biggest problem of making
your own ground pod is the bolt. It gets
lost pretty easily. So what I would I do,
what I'm doing is I'm taking an old shoe
lace and tying it around the back end of
the bolt, like this and then through the
hole where the handle was. Now I do
suggest that you maybe glue this on
with some super glue so it doesn't move
or you can use wire or if you
really want to you can put a washer on
there and glue that directly to the
bottom of the pan and just spin the head
onto the bolt. For the moment I am just
going to leave it out. I am just going to
show you the attachment. It's very simple. It goes
through the whole. Lastly, you take your
tripod head. Now one small thing before we
put this on, make sure that your
tripod, the tightening arm on your tripod
tightens above the bottom plate of the
tripod because if it tightens below it
you obviously can't tighten up because I
hit the pan. It's easy to adjust just on
this using your hex head allen keys
to take it apart, move the tripod or sorry
move the action arm up a little bit,
it tightens above the bottom of the plate.
Simply tighten it up. Once you've got it
finger tight then you use your allen key.
Allen wrench, find the right one that
fits. Hold the tripod head, insert
your allen key into the hex head of your
bolt and give it a good, not too much but
a good solid turn. It's not coming off
there. Now all we got to do is test it
out. So it's time to mount a camera and a
lens on the ground pod.
Now as I said
previously the ground pod is mostly for
wildlife photographers, therefore we will be
using longer lenses. In this case is a
300mm f/4. As you can see I'm
mounting the camera onto the pod with
the collar on the lens. The tripod collar on the
lens. This helps to balance the whole
setup, takes the stress off the coupling
between the camera body and the lens.
So we're going to take it into the garden
and we're going to give it a go.
So there you have it, the homemade ground
pod in action.
Easy, quick and cheap to make.
That's it for me I'm Doug McKinlay for AdoramaTV.
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