An occasional look at products the travel industry insists we need
What: Bottlecap tripod by Yodobashi
Aimed at: On-the-road shutterbugs who like a light load.
How much: $21.99
But does it work? Unless you have the steadiest of hands, tripods are the key to avoiding camera shake when shooting at night and in no-flash-allowed museums. But what traveler wants to add that weight and bulk to their luggage? This gadget, available in six colors, is a rubber bottle cap topped by a ball-and-socket platform that screws into the bottom of your camera.
Take a plastic bottle filled with water (or sand or pebbles), cover its top with this cap and attach it to your camera. Ingenious! Well … the doohickey comes with Japanese-only instructions; the Web site says it’s for “bottles 28.5 to 30.5mm diameter.” Huh?
We’re not in the habit of measuring our bottles, so we tried those at hand. Our mini half-liter water bottle didn’t seem to work, but it fit snugly on top of a 20-ounce Pepsi bottle. While it’s billed as a device for digital cameras, it worked with our ages-old Minolta film point-and-shoot, and offers a nice 30-degree tilt in every direction for different angles. Heavy SLR (single-lens reflex) cameras don’t fare well, however; the body of our Canon 20D stayed on just fine, but once we added the lens, the camera toppled over. Still, we’d happily stick this tiny tripod-on-the-go in our camera bag and break it out for those point-and-shoot MacGyver moments.
Available through Semsons &Co., 626-574-5557, www.semsons.com.
Anne Mcdonough, The Washington Post
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