My New Flexible Tripod & A Trip to Cypress Black Bayou

You know there’s one sound I love more then anything, that snapping sound you hear when you take a photo and all that light and color gets composed into a wonderful photographic memory.

Welcome to the blog everyone! Today is Wednesday the 3^rd of January 2017. How’s everyone week going? I was out and about yesterday getting some much needed fresh air with the family and I took some pretty amazing photos. I’ll get into that later but for now I want to talk about something. I’ve wanted one of these for a long time now and for Christmas I finally got it…

This is an awesome USA Gear Flex Tripod (With my Nikon Coolpix camera on top, you can read about that camera in an earlier blog fromlast year.) Why is it called flex? Well you can easily bend the foam grip legs in all sorts of positions to lower it or make it higher. I haven’t tried it yet but it’s actually possible to wrap it around something like a pole or fence thanks to said foam grips. With its rubber grip pads on the end of the legs the tripod will also stay stable on all sorts of uneven terrain such as sand, dirt and rock. Of course this isn’t a big (Well… Tall anyway.) tripod, it’s a table top size tripod (You can see my big tripod in the background of that photo.) but it gets the job done and can do a lot of things that big clunky tripods can’t. Of course this Tripod is compatible with any camera that has the universal screw hole on the underside of the camera.

The dimensions of this tripod is 11.75 x 2.25 x 2.12 inches and the weight total is 5.28 ounces making it super easy and portable which is another big plus of this tripod, you can carry it around with you so easily.

This tripod didn’t just come with the usual camera screw though it came with two extra tripod heads…

For starters it comes with this Smartphone grip tripod, you just screw this onto the normal camera screw and you can use all sorts of smart phones on this baby. This grip holds phones 2.0 to 3.4 inches wide so it accepts a LOT of modern smart phones if not all of them.

Lastly it also comes with this Action Mount, which means it takes GoPro and other Action cameras. Sadly I do not have a GoPro. If you're wondering why I circled it in red... Well I really want to get a hold of a GoPro or action cam of some sort one day; it would allow me to do a lot more crazy shots for videos, so this is just me dreaming a little. I’m not too familiar with how it works but it looks like it’ll keep your GoPro or Action cam secured nicely for all your action scenes.

The full camera compatibility list (According to the website) includes:

GoPro Hero4 Session , Hero+ LCD , Hero4 , Hero3+ , Hero3 , Hero2 , Hero
Drift Stealth 2 , Ghost-S , HD Ghost
HTC RE Camera
Garmin VIRB X , XE
Ion Air Pro 3 , Air Pro 2 , Air Pro Lite , Air Pro , Speed Pro , Adventure , The Game
Sony HDR AZ1 VR
JVC ADIXXION GC-XA1 , ADIXXION GC-XA2
Rollei Actioncam 400
Toshiba Camileo X-Sports
Veho Muvi HD , Muvi K K2NPNG
Xiaomi Yi

Don’t know if this is the full list or not but… That’s a lot to be honest.

I don’t have a video to show it off today sadly but this tripod does one more awesome thing. With the legs being foam grips I found that I can hold the legs and use it as a sort of stabilizing stick for my camera when recording moving video. Before I had to hold my camera with my hands, which after a while got a bit uncomfortable but recording is comfortable and it stabilizes my videos a LOT. I can also record myself without having to have someone else behind the camera, which is pretty freaking cool. Maybe I’ll start doing more vlog like videos now because of that.

Oh yeah one last piece of important information regarding this tripod, it’s maximum device weight is 6.6 pounds so no heavy duty camera will fit on this but my JVC Everio fits and doesn’t tip the tripod over. I wasn’t quite sure if it would work as I always thought this JVC was heavy but nope it works perfectly on this tripod. I would not try anything like a Nikon D60 though; I won’t even attempt to try Mum’s D60 on here, way too heavy for this Tripod.

So yeah that’s the USA Gear Flex Tripod. My thoughts? I really do love this Tripod. It’s light & portable, able to bend to all sorts of positions and feels comfortable holding it as a sort of Camera stabilizing rig for recording moving video.

If you’re looking for a portable table top tripod this is that and more! It comes with a Smartphone grip and an Action Cam mount as well making this a very useful tripod. You can buy it on Amazon.com for $14.99 which is definitely another plus with this Tripod… It’s a really low price for a pretty great tripod.

For more USA Gear items check out accessorypower.com!

Still kind of on the subject of cameras… Well I mentioned earlier on in this blog that I went out for some fresh air and took another trip with my family. Well we went out to Cyprus Black Bayou, which is positioned in North West Louisiana and I took some pretty incredible photos. Only problem is on this trip I actually forgot to take my new tripod with me. I know I know, I’ve been dying to get a hold of this tripod for ages and I actually FORGOT to take it with me on the trip… I’m a fool sometimes. 

Anyway yeah I took some pretty great photos of Cypress Black Bayou so take a look.

This may be one of my favorite photos that I’ve ever taken. For some reason the sun was perfectly positioned with the two posts at the end of the pier (Which I walked out on like a daredevil with my NOT waterproof camera… but hey it was stable.) When I took the photo the sun light was also come down directly at my camera so it affected the color and imagery slightly giving it this reddish sunset hue, maybe the clouds helped a bit too.  Really this photo is just incredible to me.

Now here’s a photo I took looking slightly to the right of the pier… See it’s actually daylight blue now, with no clouds. I swear these two photos were taken minutes apart from each other. It’s surprising how taking photos from different angles can really change the look and colors of the lake. The sun position and the fact that the clouds were only on one side of the Bayou probably was the reason these two photos so different but it surprised me regardless. It was also around 4-4:30 Central American time when I took these photos so it was about an hour from sunset anyway.

Cypress Black Bayou despite being named Black and being a Bayou was very gorgeous today. It was pretty calm and peaceful too, not too many people out on the waters so you could hear the ripples of the water and the fresh breeze.

There were a couple of people on the water actually and I snapped this photo of these two guys fishing.

So yeah that was our trip out to Cypress Black Bayou in Northwest Louisiana. If you live nearby this area or are traveling nearby you might want to come check it out around this time of the year. Weather is nice, not too much rain and the water is nice and boat worthy.

Anyway that’s about it for today’s blog but I have one last thing to mention… Mum has come up with this crazy idea and we have no idea if it’ll work but we’re having a go. So we eat lettuce, like quite a bit of lettuce and Mum came across this idea of re-growing lettuce simply by placing the stem part in a cup or bowl of water. We always get more lettuce anyway but Mum wanted to see if this would actually work.  So! Today on the blog we’re starting a new journey… The Let’s Re-grow A Lettuce Journey.

We put it into a shot glass, I don’t know if we’ll have to move it into something bigger but it’s working for now, filled it up slightly so the bottom of the lettuce is soaking and we will be replacing the water every day. This was started last Monday so let’s see what happens within a week huh? I don’t know if it’ll work or not but hey if it does that’ll be pretty cool.

So that’s it for the blog for today be sure to check me out on Instagram and check out my Youtube Channel where I post all sorts of videos from Travel Videos, Knitting, Pokemon and more! Also check me out on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat as ZAKManK, and of course Ravelry!

See you on Friday!