Blog: Giottos Tripod Review
Summary: Rubbish, buy Manfrotto instead.
Ok, i have not taken any images to go along with this “review” yet, but here is my opinion on the Giottos MTL3261B Vertical Column Aluminium Tripod.
First impressions of this tripod were very positive. Its finish is nice, with a professional look, the foam padding on the legs is comfortable and well secured. The Legs have a wide level of adjust ability, allowing you to get shots from extremely low angles and the leg locks seem sturdy and easy to open and close, even with gloves on. Set up time for this tripod is very quick. All this makes the Giottos seem like excellent value for money. You even get a little pouch with a set of Allen keys to keep the legs tight – how thoughtful.
However, here lies the problem. You will need to use that set of Allen keys and you will need to use them often.
The leg locks, whilst easy to use do not stay tight. The plastic bushings within the locking mechanism rub and eventually become loose. Time to get that Allen key out and tighten the bolts. This is fine – until you get to the situation i am now in, where there is no more thread on the adjustment bolt. One of the legs is now permanently loose and the others are not much better. I have relegated my MTL3261B to light-stand duties as i will no longer trust any of my camera gear on it.
The finish that looked so nice when the legs came out of the box does not last either. The glossy parts around the neck of the unit are still beautiful, but the Matt finish legs are rubbed and the aluminium is clearly visible through the thin paint.
I have owned these legs for just over a year – I inquired about a warranty replacement after 3 months with Warehouse Express, but was instructed that i would have to pay to return them for inspection and that postage would not be refundable. Postage would have been approx £15 due to the weight so i didn’t bother – its now a lightstand as i said.
If you REALLY cant afford the equivalent Manfrotto model (190XPRO) then by all means purchase the Giottos – I hope that my experience was down to a faulty model. But never has the saying “buy cheap, buy twice” been so pertinent as it has been with the Giottos MTL3261B.
If a Giottos employee reads this – I would gladly test a loan model and update this review with my findings.
If you have any questions, please feel free to comment and i will help if i can.
Coming Soon: Giottos MH1302 Tripod Head Review.
*spoiler – its not good!*
Blog: Shoot Shoreditch
As Ollie said, We lucked out on the creative side a bit today – but we were really let down by the Jpeg output of teh 5DII. I have just uploaded these RAW files to lightroom and converted to JPEG – no other edits.
The JPEG copies they showed in the competition final slidelshow were really under exposed with ridiculously high black levels. Quite curious!
As said, not amazing photo’s due to the rushed nature of teh time constraints involved but allot of fun none the less!
I will paraphrase the clues below as the originals were very wierd/cryptic.
1: The clue was to find the terracotta building, which was once a Mission. So we took the word literally and created our own “mission”: We evaded the traffic and got to the island in teh middle of Old Street roundabout. We quickly drew a crude map/plan and started taking photos. No more than 2 minutes later a police van arrived and asked what we were doing. We said we were just taking pictures -The Policeman immediately eyed that we had written MI5 on the piece of paper and got quite concerned and it wasnt until we could prove that we were on a treasure hunt that he beleived that we werent evil terrorists. To be fair he could have given us allot of grief but he left us to it, but did circle the roundabout constantly untill we beat our hasty retreat!
And yes those are “85mm” Binoculars lol!
2. The clue was that the was a sculpture that could be climbed in shoreditch park – so we decided to pretend that Ollie was a master mason/sculpter. He certainly has some exotic tools!
3. We had to find a tattoo parlour named the Jolly Sailor and portray that there was a good/bad, happy/sad vibe going on with a tattoo. Laura asked if we could take a picture and the artist said no problem and began to gurn sadistically. As a bonus it turned out it was Alan Carr getting a tattoo lol.
4. We had to find the shard building and the clue spoke of its Double decker elevators. So we got a picture of it with a double decker bus – ridiculous wide angle with Ollies 12-24mm!
5. We began to struggle here. This clue was not attached to any location. It simply said Fashion a Design. This clue really annoyed Laura due to it grammatical errors!
6. Creative block: Well, you can see what we tried here with a little of camera flash – i hope!?
7. Production Line: In hind sight we probably had a better shot of this, but deleted it whilst sorting out the card for the judges (cards were only allowed 8 images on them so we had to delete all other versions.) We did a version with all 4 cups being drank to different levels so they were in a sequence from full to empty. The lattes were disgusting and we all burnt our mouths whilst trying to rush through it!
8: We hand to find this Gallery. Completely out of time and creative energy by now we decided to just crack out the trusty wide angle and pray.
I would definitely do the event again, but next time takes lots of random silly props. The winning teams had miniature people (a la cravendale adverts), toy cars, wooden mannequins, bicycles and babies etc. The closest we came to a prop was stealing a bunch of colour swatch cards from a DIY store!
