Digital Home Thoughts: Gorillas In Our Midst: The Gorillapod and Gorillapod SLR Zoom Reviewed

The Baby Gorilla
The original GorillaPod is excellent for point and shoot cameras. It's really small and fits easily inside your gear bag. In fact, I lost mine inside my daily bag.


Figure 2: The clip attached to my SD800.

Along with the GorillaPod, Joby includes a clip that you attach to the standard tripod thread on your camera. That clip is designed to pop off the tripod with the touch of a button and lets you grab the camera off of it and continue shooting. It's nice to not have to spin the GorillaPod around 200 times to get the camera off it and Joby gets a pat on the back for this.

I found the original GorillaPod to be pretty stable. Granted, you won't be able to lean on it to shoot or anything ridiculous, but it does an admirable job of holding the camera steady while you line up a shot. It's also good for macro shots, although you may have to hold down one leg if you tip the camera forward. Because of its light weight, there's no counterweight to your camera, so be careful on those canyon ledges!

One nice design point from the original model is that it has what could best be described as an extension where the legs meet that gives you a lot of flexibility in pointing the camera. I particularly like that you don't need to strap a big and heavy ball head on top of a relatively small gadget.