This is not going to be a full review of the Gorillapod, there are enough of those already, just my experiences with it to date.
For my holiday kit, I bought the Gorillapod SLR Zoom and the matching ball head, believing it would be much more useful than my table tripod, but still fitting in a small-ish camera bag.
Negatives first. It's not a true video tripod as I have it because it doesn't pan and tilt. I doubt whether a video head would be much use on it anyway. More about that later. Because of the Cokin adaptor I have permanently fitted, the quick release plate will not slide in normally, I fitted it backwards and it worked OK, but it's not ideal. I can soon fix that now we're back home.
As I used it, I became more confident in its abilities and it did everything I asked of it. If I had to use one word to sum it up - BRILLIANT!
It only takes a little imagination to figure out a way to use it in almost any situation, I found I could use it almost anywhere. As long as the legs could be wrapped around or hooked on to something stable, it could be made into a camera support. As a mini tripod I used it on tables, walls, rocks, the ground, anything steady.
I also found it could be used as a makeshift stabilizer for pans etc., I bent the ends of two legs to form a U shape for the handles and used the third leg as the balance weight. Lack of video head no problem!
At one point, trying to take a macro photograph with a still camera, on my knees and couldn't stop shaking about, I couldn't get the angle or distance with it as a tripod, I used one leg of the Gorillapod as a mini monopod. It worked a treat.
The whole point of the exercise was to take one camera support that would fit in the bag so I would take it everywhere we went, having decided that a big tripod was too inconvenient and more often than not, left in our apartment. Also, my "Digirig" is only suitable for some situations. The Gorillapod fulfilled that need with a very high stars rating in my book.
My wife liked it so much, she bought one. Mine is going to find a place in my main photo kit bag, it's so versatile.
Dave
