Like most travel and adventure photographers, I’ve gone around many times on the question of camera support. It’s a special problem with wildlife, and most of all, with birds. Critters of any sort never seem to understand how difficult it can be to quickly get them in the field of view, focus, and either take a picture or start a video. Once you get things started, they continue to torture you with movement, and through all of this you have to worry about keeping them in view and avoiding shake.
Tripods are almost impossible to use effectively in vehicles, which is how wildlife photography tends to be done (for safety reasons, and because you often happen on sightings while in transit). If the subject is far enough away, though, and if it’s safe to get out of the vehicle and set up a tripod, there’s no question it offers the best possible camera support. Where it won’t work, we have a number of options that present both plusses and minuses.
Many wildlife photographers will use the beanbag approach. A beanbag is pretty much what the name suggests, a cloth or plastic container that’s filled with something that can be shaped to the contour of what it’s sitting on to keep it in place. The camera is then placed with the lens or the tripod collar base on the beanbag for support. It’s steady once set up, and because there’s no tight connection between beanbag and camera, you can usually pan to follow motion.
Beanbags have their issues, though. First, it’s often difficult to find something you can rest it securely on. Most won’t conform to something very narrow or highly irregular in shape, and if the only available seat is soft itself, the setup won’t be stable. You often find yourself scrunching down in the seat to try to get the right angle, and you’ll have to move a lot of your body to pan, which means you have a good chance of running into something that stops your motion, like another person or a camera bag.
Another popular option is the monopod, which is a lot like a single tripod leg (expanding and all) with a mount on top. A monopod won’t support a camera free-standing, but it will keep even a large camera reasonably steady for either photos or videos. It attaches to the camera/lens like a tripod, so there’s not usually a lot of fitting issues.
The plus of monopods is that you can adjust the legs so that they rest on a seat, on the floor of a vehicle, on an ice chest, or whatever else is handy. You can then get the camera to eye level without laying down. Monopods also pan easily, and they’ll allow at least some up and down camera rotation to get shots of things that aren’t at eye level. They’re typically light, and you’ll want to get the lightest option that will hold your camera, because sometimes you may have to pick the camera, lens, and monopod up and hold it like a camera to get into position quickly or aim at a target that’s fairly high.
The biggest minus of monopods is that if you forget they’re monopods and let go, camera, lens, and everything else falls. Obviously, that’s a major disaster. Monopods often have a small wrist strap to protect from this, but it makes it harder to switch cameras if you use it. The second-most-cited problem is that it’s important to pay attention to whether you’re tilting the camera side to side because you’re not holding the monopod level. If your camera has a level indicator, use it with a monopod.
Option three is the clamp. A clamp lets you attach a gadget to a pipe or limb, usually not more than about two inches in diameter, and then attach the camera. It will hold things as steady as whatever you’re clamping to permits (branches can bend!), and if you can attach it to a vehicle (the bar separating seats on a safari vehicle, the window using supplied spacers, or any other similar surface), it can offer stable support, almost like a tripod.
The problem is that once you’ve clamped onto something, you’ll have limited range of motion with respect to subject position. If you clamp to something other than a horizontal surface, panning may hit the thing you’re clamped to. The camera may also make it difficult to attach and detach the clamp, making a quick move difficult. If you don’t clamp securely, you can also drop the whole rig, or have it turn around on the object you’re clamping and bump hard into something.
The last of my options, which is my current (and, of course, provisional) choice, is the flexible-leg short tripod popularized by the GorillaPod. There are a series of these gadgets ranging from something that can hold a phone to something that will hold about 11 pounds of camera and lens. The biggest one is about 15 inches tall, with three legs that look like robotic appendages, made up of a series of plastic-and-metal balls that let you twist each leg around something, creating (if you’re careful) a tight fit. The plastic parts are non-slip, so on most surfaces they’ll hold in place.
Obviously, something 15 inches high won’t serve as a traditional tripod, but that’s where the winding-legs thing comes in. Unless you’re in a desert (and even then, sometimes) there will be trees around you can wind something around. There’s always your vehicle, too, and in case neither is available, you can bend the legs into a “buffalo horn” configuration with the last leg facing back, then hold the camera up in front by the horns, with the leg into your shoulder, and you have a pretty stable brace.
I tried one of the small GorillaPods in Africa in 2019, and it sort-of-worked for the smaller of the camera/lens combinations, the one I was using for video. The “sort-of” qualifier is necessary because it was too light to hold even that really well, and it was totally incapable of holding the D500 with the 50-500 lens. Still, it offered enough support to indicate a larger one could be the answer, so on my 2021 trip I’m going to be using the big model, with a custom ball head. I’ll report on how that works after the trip!