Before I went to Iceland and got heavily critiqued on my tripod, I had no idea that it was bad. It always worked for me, and I managed to get the shots I needed for 4 years of my photography life just fine. But no, then all these fancy Americans with their fancy tripods surrounded me and started laughing at poor Benro for being flimsy and so on and so forth… the damage was done.
And apparently, all the others here are not flimsy.
So I got home, I thought about it, I spoke to people and I got a very handsome-looking tripod made by 3leggedthing called Steve. It looked sturdy, it felt big and powerful… it was shiny, and colourful, and the head plate holding screw broke in 1 month. It’s okay, I thought to myself, let me reach out to them and they might solve my issue. And they did, they shipped me a new head within a week. It was less fancy than the original one but fine, it worked. For another couple of months… until I lost a screw from the leg somewhere on my way around Dubai. I got so frustrated with it, I just shoved it into my cupboard and went back to the flimsy one.
I also had a piece of a tripod at work made by Vanguard. It was quite heavy and not particularly useful, but it had a central column that you can use if you need to set it parallel to the ground – useful for food photos, and macro photos sometimes… I do a lot of social media shoots, so the bird’s eye view is the shit right now, but if you do it for 3 hours you’ll feel the tension in your back… believe me.
Anyway, not so long I enjoyed the freedom of this tripod because the central column holding mechanism just shattered into plastic pieces all over the place. I didn’t give up when it happened and tried to superglue it back to where it was… but you know, you can’t fix something that was not well thought through.
So now I am back to the flimsy Benro, and I am thinking about where to invest my money again… sadly we don’t have a good choice of tripods in Dubai shops, but I think I will have to get a 055 ManfrottoXPRO3 or 4. And as much as I am not such a big fan of Manfrotto and I remember what happened to F-Stoppers in Iceland with this tripod, I don’t think I have much of a choice.
Peace and love everyone!
Anna
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