TRAVEL TRIPODS

A chunky camera kit is more than enough to carry around, considering that most of us like to travel light, and any outing is likely to be more pleasurable without a cumbersome tripod weighing you down. Conventional tripods tend to be big, heavy and unwieldy, so we often leave them at home, where they’re of no use whatsoever. By contrast, travel tripods are made to be compact and lightweight. Traditionally, though, they’ve often been flimsy, relatively unstable and too small to enable a comfortable operating height.

“The new breed of travel tripods aim to give you the best of both worlds”

The new breed of travel tripods aim to give you the best of both worlds. The vast majority have legs that swing upwards for stowage, so that the head is encircled by the feet. This reduces the folded height by around 8cm to 10cm. Some models also include as many as five sections in each leg and a two-section extending centre column, reducing the folded height even further, while still enabling a useful maximum operating height.

All of the tripods we’ve chosen for this group test are sold as kits, complete with heads. Ball heads are by far the most common,