Hanging Out With The Cullmann, Promaster, and #3 Legged Thing

The current rage for lightweight tripods has relieved a lot of travelling photographers of their weight worries. They buy ones that fold and fold and fold until they can get into the suitcase and as they are being made of increasingly lighter materials it is only a matter of time until they become actually lighter than air and will be stored on the ceiling...

While the light weight is helpful when travelling, it is counter to the principle of anchoring your camera down for the exposure.  That is why Cullmann, Promaster, and Three Legged Thing provide little metal hooks at the bottom of the center column of their tripods.

Their intention is that you will hang a weight there and stabilise the assembly in the wind. Good idea, if you do it right - a problem if you do it wrong. The trick is to have the weight hooked onto the column but resting lightly on the ground.

If you were to just hang a Coles bag on it filled with tins of salmon but leave it to wave in the breeze it would act as a pendulum and set up more vibrations than it quelled. Let it pull down to the ground firmly.