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Notes on the Ultrapod II.

PhotoNotes.org DonationsCopyright © 2001-2007 NK Guy

http://photonotes.org/reviews/ultrapod-ii/

The Ultrapod II is a small, compact and extremely lightweight folding tripod manufactured by an American firm with the odd name of Pedco. Here are my notes on the thing.

Description.

The tripod is made from black nylon, apparently reinforced with fibreglass. It’s roughly 20 cm (7 inches) long and can support the weight of a medium 35mm SLR camera and average to small lens handily. But it’s too small to handle the weight of any large consumer lens or basically any Canon L series lens - the camera will topple over or at the very least sag annoyingly. It also doesn’t do very well with portrait camera configurations - it works best when the camera is sitting horizontally in landscape configuration. There’s also a smaller Ultrapod, which is of the same basic design only a little over half the size, but I’ve never used it - it’s more designed for pocket-sized point and shoot cameras.

The Ultrapod II is of a pretty simple design. It has one main leg that’s essentially a narrow 90-degree bracket into which two smaller legs fold. None of the legs telescope, each foot has a rubbery plastic anti-scratch covering (which sadly is easily lost), and the legs are attached with metal rivets. At the top of the main leg is a smaller piece of plastic containing both a single thumbscrew tightener and a plastic ballhead the size of a marble. The end of the ball head screws into a standard 1/4-20 camera tripod mount. It doesn’t have a rotating collar or ring - you have to turn the entire tripod in order to screw it into the camera, which is a little inconvenient. The tripod also has a velcro strap that wraps around it. (Pedco’s Web site photo explains the design photographically better than I can verbally.)

What do I think of it?

I like the tripod for casual use. The adjustable ball head works quite well, assuming the lens used is small, and lets you clamp the camera in a variety of angles. However with heavier lenses you’ll find the thing tends to sag after you tighten it, which is pretty frustrating. People with larger lenses - pretty well any Canon L series lenses - will find this problematic to the point of uselessness. This tripod is designed for casual amateur use, not professional use. And, as noted above, you can’t use it in any configuration other than landscape with larger cameras or lenses.

The bracket design of the main leg and the velcro strap are also surprisingly useful. It lets you strap the tripod (legs not unfolded) to various objects - fences, posts, trees, etc. The velcro then holds the whole thing in place, and you can position the camera with the ball head to point at your subject easily. Very useful, though the velcro and ball head can both only hold so much. I suppose you could also use the tripod as a small chestpod, but it’s a bit short for that, and you’d have to crane your neck and adopt weird poses.

The design is quite versatile. Last year, for example, I used the tripod to take photos of a small sailboat from the very top of the mast, looking down. I attached the tripod to a simple wooden bracket, wrapped miles of gaffer tape around the whole mess to ensure it wouldn’t fall off, then triggered the camera remotely using an infrared controller. Lots of fun. Another time I wanted to take a snapshot on a rocky cliffside by the ocean. So I took a a length of driftwood and jammed it into a crack between two boulders. I could then strap the camera to the wood using the Ultrapod.

The tripod is very useful for hiking and other situations in which weight is at a premium - it weighs just 100 grams (4 ounces) or so - and can easily be strapped to a hiking pole to create an impromptu monopod. And the ball head and strap are very handy features indeed. You can also use it for supporting slave flashes that have tripod mounts. I’ve found it a very useful thing for taking photographs in low-light situations where regular tripods are banned. For example, I’ve used it to take 30 second exposures in tourist caves and European cathedrals just by strapping it to a handrail or propping it on a table or whatever.

My only major complaint (other than the problem of the tripod sagging under the weight of larger lenses) is that it has an incredibly nasty chemical smell that took over a year and a half to dissipate. That, and the velcro strap is now starting to tear, rendering one feature of the tripod fairly useless.

Where do you find them?

I bought my Ultrapod II at Mountain Equipment Co-op in Vancouver for about $25 Canadian. It also appears that Pedco manufacture the Ultrapod II for other distributors in an OEM (original equipment manufacturer) style, and these distributors put their own brandnames on the product. US outdoor supplier REI is one of these, for example. A quick Web search reveals a number of places that sell them. Popular NYC-based photo store B&H also carry them.

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