00:00          On today's show, we're going to be taking a look at the Zomei tripod, something that is really quite truly funkalicious.

00:14          Good morning and welcome to Photo Joseph's Photo Moment. The first left three times a week show here at youtube.com/PhotoJoseph, all about photography, video and occasionally things live streaming. Hey, slight different change to the format today. Normally we do a Q&A at the end of the show, which we are going to do at the end of this show. Normally that video is listed elsewhere on youtube separately from this one later, which is going to be again today. However the difference is that the Q&A video is not going to be publicly visible. There's a couple of reasons for this. They go back to things that I learned at VidSummit last week and if you want to know why I'm doing this, click up here and watch the two videos that I did from VidSummit last week. Sharing the stuff that I learned, but the only way you're going to get to the Q&A videos if you want to see those is to get to the end of this video and click on the link there to the next one that there's a reason for it.

00:57          It's a good reason. Anyway, so that's the format, so if you want to see the Q&A, you’re going, where’d the Q&A's go. That's where they are there at the end of the main show. So speaking to the main show. Let's talk about this thing. This is one of those products that this company reached out to me and they said, hey, would you like to do a review on our product? And I said, sure, why not? And the rest is history. This is from a company called ZOMEI. There we go. There's her name ZOMEI comes into nice little bag. As you can see in this is a tripod. That is. It is a bit interesting. It's got a unique feature that may not be new to tripods. I'm sure there are other tripods out there that do this, but I have yet to ever see one before I open it up though.

01:29          I want to share one of the reasons that I really liked this tripod. This is my Think Tank Airporter case. This is the, this one is the airport advantage plus there's a lot of different airport models. The whole point of this Think Tank case is that it is the size, the Max size for carry on luggage and I think, I think this is the domestic… the international one. There's like an inch difference between domestic and international. Not that I think you'll ever not get away with it if you have the wrong one. But um, this is the one that I carry. If I'm going to carry a lot of gear you don't want to go carry on. So when I went down to VidSummit, I brought this, this was my video bag, um, had three camera kit in here. So I had two GH5s, a GH5S, lenses.

02:05          Everything that I need for the video shoot, including the tripod. Now this is pretty cool. Let me just show this to you, I'm going to open this up and I don't think that ZOMEI necessarily intended. This is just kind of a coincidence, but look at this. Let's go for a top down. View it. So here's the really cool thing. This tripod, which is quite a big tripod, fits perfectly in there. This fits inside of my rolling case I have other tripods that fit inside the rolling case, but they're really small. So this one is like the perfect size. If it was, if it was one inch bigger, it wouldn't fit. If it was half an inch bigger, you could squeeze it. It's just absolutely perfect in there. So that is really, really awesome. That makes me super happy. I could fit two of these into here.

02:48          No problem. I had this one and a smaller tripod in there and then a um, a Platypod as a third stabilization instead of packing three tripods into this and that worked out really well. So I like that the, the size of this is perfect. If you've got that particular case I should see as well, would it? It actually would fit inside of the Pelican. I've got my Pelican. What is this model here? Let's just get this up in here. This is the standard Pelican. Same thing goes into carry on the… the… I always forget the model of this; it's written on here somewhere. Maybe it's on the back. No. Oh, there it is. On the top. This is the 1510. So the Pelican 1510. Again, total standard fits in your carry on, fits in your overhead luggage. It will fit inside of that as well, but I'm probably with a bit less flexibility just given the layout of that anyway, size-wise.

03:36          Awesome. Okay, so let's try to find it fits. Let's see what else it does. Let's see. The way it opens up, this is one of those kind of inverts so opens down. Now here we're going to run into what I'm going to say is my first complaint and I'm complaining without having tried to fix it yet, so it's kind of like, you know, quit your pie hole. Stop complaining and try and fix it. It is really stiff. Really stiffed opening, closed. Now there are adjustments on here, I haven't adjusted them yet. Some of the columns are really stiff. I think a little bit of WD40 would go a long way, but um, it is at least out of the box, really stiff. So you might want to get in there with the tools and kind of loosen things up a little bit. Now the way that the goes, you may have recognized there's a little thumb release here, push that in and it will go to that position to stop push it again.

04:21          It'll go to that position, push it again, it'll go all the way up to collapse. So it's got really good solid locking at these different positions so you can get it spread out in a variety of different ways, which is always nice. All right, let's get this down. Down, down. Here we go. I'm feeling out of breath. It's like I've been running around like a media today. I really haven't got this down. I get this down. We're gonna. Open up all the legs here. Get this all spread out so you can see just how high it really is because that is of course kind of an important aspect of a tripod, knowing how high it gets, but I love all these new. That was all right. There we go. So there's that position. So now we're already at above my eye height. I'm about five foot 10 so this I'd have to go up on tippy toes to get up higher, but it goes higher still.

05:11          If I open this I can go higher still. So that's a little bit too high. Would go higher stuff. So that's even out of frame. So that's, I don't know, let me call that seven feet or so. So that's a good height. Oh, that's a really good height for a tripod that fits into your travel bag. Okay. So that's cool. I love that. Uh, bring this back down. You know, it's kind of a ball head on the top standard ball head, nothing too exciting. There are standard quick release place. It is the Arca Swiss style quick release. So that's all good and well, but here's, here's the funky part. You ready for this? You ready for this funkiness and I'll bring this back up again. Make sure this is in frame. Ready what it bends. It goes over and then it goes back this way.

05:49          Look at this. It does this weirdness. You think. Why would you want to do that weirdness? Well, there's a couple things you can do with this, so if I lock everything else down, let's make sure that's nice and secure. That's open. That is securely. We pulled it back a little bit. There we go. That's secure. That is loose. Take the ball ahead. Let's imagine if you will the camera sitting on top of here. Uh, let's see here. There we go. Locked in place. Everything's good. I now have a kind of video panning. No, it's not a centered or give normal video pan. You would want the tripod spinning part centered over the camera. So you have that type of a pet and you don't get that. You don't get a perfect pivot off of the center, but you have a kind of an arch pivot right there, which could be just fine depending on the kind of shot you're doing and you could make that a bigger pivot by filling this out a little bit and then doing it like so.

06:36          You could also put the camera facing this way and do kind of an arc push if you did that, and usually if you're moving a tripod, it's not a fluid head tripod. This way you get really kind of jittery motion, but this essentially is. They're not marketing it as a fluid head, but it feels very fluidy if that makes any sense inside. So that's pretty good in there. That's a really nice smooth movement. The other way you can do this, if you're of the way you would use this is to flip it upside down. So let's see here. Let's say I'm doing this. I got the camera in here pointing straight down. I now have the ability to do something like, Oh, here, even right now at this table, I can do kind of a tabletop photography thing where I could have my camera here pointing straight down and I've got this obviously out of the way of their legs.

07:17          So I think that's pretty slick. I like that. I think it's kind of cool and funky. So yeah, I mean other than that, it's just a tripod. It's just a tripod. It feels quite stable. It feels really good. I definitely have held more stable tripod. This is not like manfrotto pro level stability. It does have on the bottom here, the little bag hook so you can hang a bag on there if you've ever wondered why that's there. It's not just a convenient place to hang your camera bag. This isn't a a like the coat hook under your under the bar. It's not for that. I mean sure, but its purpose is to add weight by hanging something heavy here like your bag and they'll get crazy and hang like a 200 pound bag into here. But by adding some weight here, you're adding stability to the whole rig, so that's why you really want to have these hooks on there.

07:58          Um, this does come off so you can invert that head as well. So if you wanted to go, Gosh, you could take this thing, take the legs at their lowest level, invert the head, stick the head, do this little l bracket sticking out thing. And you could have the camera very nicely. Stabled basically any distance from the surface. So yeah, I think you do have complete control and there's no minimum distance that you could position it to the, to the surface. So there you go. That's about it. A little stiff to operate. I think it needs a little bit of loosening. Oh, it does come with a extra column. This is a little weird that comes with not much. What is this, like four inches or so extra column that goes here, except that I have not been able to get the bottom is going to protect her plate.

08:40          I cannot get that off. I don't know. I can't. I don't know. And it's not going to give you a huge amount of extra lights, but I'll give you a little bit so it comes with this. If you could figure out how to get it on, you're doing better than I am, but this apparently attaches there. It gives you a little bit of extra length so you get a little extra height or a little extra handle if you're doing this type of a thing. So that's about it. That my friends is all there is to it. Hey, we're going to wrap it up there. We're going to go into the Q&A. So if you want to do the Q&A then just stick around for a moment. [inaudible], it's actually probably already on the screen. Clicking somewhere here. Alright, let's let's, let's answer some time.