The Picture is nothing to do with Southampton; it’s the Haslar Marina Pier Wall in the rain at about 0630.
I can’t remember if it was last year or the year before when I first started using my tripod instead of my monopod during the really dark mornings. Now, this year, I’ve become a little more adventurous in the taking of pictures (please note, I’m not saying better). The monopod has played a significant role in enabling be to do that.
I am now on the verge of moving back from use of the monopod to the tripod and I’ve realised that putting the tripod in the same position that I have very easily put the monopod, is not impossible, but is by no means anywhere near as easy. Now initially, the obvious solution is to carry both the monopod and the tripod. Yeah, that didn’t last long (just a few fractions of a seconds) – there was no way I was going to do that.
The obvious thing to do is to get a tripod that is also a monopod. Hence my trip to Southampton. The intention was to visit Jessops in West Quay. Unfortunately, that shop has closed down. There are two branches of the London Camera Exchange out of West Quay, near the high street. One slightly further away than the other. I went the furthest one first. When I said what I wanted, they told me that it was unusual for the centre column to be the monopod, it was more likely that one of the legs converted. Manfroto have such a tripod. The first branch didn’t have one but they phoned and confirmed that the second did. Actually, the staff in both branches of LCE were very helpful. They let me have a play with the tripod, but I ended up not buying it. The process of converting the leg to a monopod, and back again was just too fiddly,
We came back via Hobbycraft, I wanted to buy a rainbow storage stack, but again I didn’t – not didn’t they have quite what I wanted, I can get it cheaper off Amazon. I want one of these, because I want to try and be organised with my model railway stuff. Anyhow. The end of all this is that I have bought online one of these; https://www.kentfaith.co.uk/tripods
Both a unsuccessful and successful day, even with it chucking down, it was a lovely day out.
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