Monthly Archives

November 2013

A Home Away from Home: JOBY at Galileo Summer Quest

By | Friends of Joby, Gorillapod | No Comments

(JOBY Note: This post was written by Jessica Ellis at Galileo Learning which hosts awesome innovation camps for kids. Check ’em out!)

On a warm summer morning in Palo Alto, twenty middle school students are busy at work planning their set for the world’s next great movie, so they proclaim. They are equipped with Pentax adventure cameras, a sense of determination, a willingness to collaborate and, a JOBY GorillaPod Video tripod. Summer camp is not the typical setting for JOBY users, but these tripods are no less valuable here.

Galileo Summer Quest: GorillaPod Video Positioning

Campers need equipment that is weather resistant and can withstand eight straight weeks of heavy use. Galileo provides over 36,000 weeks of camp to Bay Area kids and providing high quality equipment that enhances the camp experience is a top priority. High quality equipment is important because it enable kids to focus on the art of their idea. Galileo Summer Quest helps campers tap into their natural creativity and empowers them to design and build projects with tools that are often unavailable at home or at school. Their adventure is one of wild imagination and innovation. The JOBY tripod helps budding photographers and videographers push their ideas beyond the confines of a typical class and into the exciting and risk-free environment of an innovation summer camp.

Galileo Summer Quest: GorillaPod Video Notebook

All summer, campers at Galileo Summer Quest’s 14 camps from Tiburon to San Jose have been putting JOBY tripods to the ultimate test of endurance and usability. Galileo Summer Quest offers a wide range of one-week courses in the fields of Digital and Fine Arts, Building and Making and High Technology. This year, JOBY tripods were offered as a compliment to three of these courses: Digital Filmmaking, Digital Photography and Lego Robotics. In Digital Filmmaking, campers use the JOBY GorillaPod Video tripods for shooting a 3-5 minute movie. In Digital Photography, campers use the GorillaPod SLR Zoom tripods with their Nikon SLRs to set up their images for portrait photo shoots and for their Public Service Announcement photographs. In Lego Robotics, campers use the JOBY GorillaPod Hybrid tripods to film their “vlogs” of robot competitions, which they then upload to YouTube to share with parents and friends.

The JOBY tripods replaced the aluminum tripods used in the field last summer. They had been one of the greatest bottlenecks for campers in Digital Filmmaking and Photography. The aluminum tripods continuously broke and were a great frustration to campers who had designed their projects to require tripods for stability in their films and photos. This summer, the tripods have far exceeded expectations. One highlight of the JOBY tripods has been their use in Digital Photography. Campers love the size and versatility of the Zoom tripods. One camper wrapped her tripod around the branch of a tree to get a unique angle and another balanced it on picnic tables for a wide aperture photo shoot.

GorillaPod Video

The JOBY tripods not only have proven rugged enough for constant handling by 11 and 12 year olds, but have also engaged middle-school aged campers with their bendable and magnetic legs. Stored with the magnet side attached to metal file cabinets and hanging from metal binders, the Joby tripods looks very much at home at Galileo summer camps.

Galileo Summer Quest: GorillaPod Video Herd

 

As the summer comes to a close, the tripods will be packed with their cameras and stored away for next year when campers will return, eager to capture their ever-evolving stories. A sense of adventure and openness to new ideas has always been part of the culture at Galileo and now, so is JOBY.

 

 

What’s YOUR Angle? New GoPro Mounts & Tripods from JOBY!

By | Uncategorized | No Comments

We’ve seen our customers do some pretty wild things with their GoPro cameras and our GorillaPod line from the humble GorillaPod Original to the mighty GorillaPod Focus. But we thought that ,you know, we really should be creating products specifically for the action video crowd. I mean, there are only a trillion of them being sold every day.

So, we thought about where our products do well with GoPro users and where they don’t do as well so we could create a proper GoPro family (don’t worry Contour and Sony ActionCam fans, these products equally well with those too!)

JOBY GoPro Mounts and Tripods

To see the whole family in its blazing glory and soak in an awesome skate video, check out the Action Series family in action!

First up is our GorillaPod Action Tripod. With a quick-release clip (our Tripod Mount for GoPro) designed specifically for GoPro Cameras, plus our standard 1/4″-20 quick-release clip, you can use your Action Tripod to capture epic off-body footage with any action camera and compact system camera up to 2.2 lbs / 1 kg. We know we’re preaching to the choir when we talk about how awesome GorillaPod’s flexible legs are for getting footage in tricky environments, but those flexible legs and grippy rings are even more helpful in the wild places you take your GoPro.  Another awesome feature of the GorillaPod Action Tripod is it’s integrated ballhead. It’s 360° of pan and ±90° tilt knob makes it easy to fine tune your compositions, plus it has a bubble level to help you get a level shot. No LCD screen to preview, no problem! Plus, GorillaPod Action Tripod is durable and lightweight.

 

GoPro Tripod

 

But if you already have a GorillaPod or a tripod, no worries!  You can buy the Tripod Mount for GoPro as a standalone piece and you can use it with whatever GorillaPod you already have (or any other tripod with a 1/4″-20 screw) The mount is built to also instantly slide into the GorillaPod SLR-Zoom, GorillaPod Hybrid, and GorillaPod Action Tripod so you don’t even have to remove the mount from your GoPro! In fact, for a totally different take on tripods for action video cameras, combine our Tripod Mount for GoPro with our Gpod Mini Magnetic. Check out the little guy defiantly gripping on to this metal platform!

Small GoPro Tripod

 

Next up is our Action Clamp series. Our GorillaPods can adapt to almost everything, but one thing they’re not as good at are staying clamped securely to the edge of surfaces like the edge of a door, a car window, etc., especially where the surface might be moving a lot. Maybe you want to make sure that your GoPro can’t be knocked over while filming. For that, what you really need is a clamp, not a flexible tripod.

But a lot of clamps out there are annoying to use. Some are hard to use (ie, you need the hand strength of a professional rock climber to work its jaws open enough), and some are just slow (screw the top….screw the bottom…and then repeat when you move it.) So, we created this awesome clamp that has a moveable locking arm that automatically locks in place as pressure is put on it. By closing the majority of clamp gap with the sliding locking arm, you only have to tighten the other arm just enough to secure a firm grip as opposed to screwing to just close space.  This lets you resize your clamp super fast from something as thin as a stop sign head to a table ledge up to 2 inches / 5 cm in a flash. Each side has two 1/4″-20 screw openings which lets you place your attachments on either end (or use both at the same time!)

Action Clamp for GoPro Video Cameras

 

So, we created two Action Clamps. The first is the Action Clamp with GorillaPod Arm. This has a 5 balls and sockets arm of GorillaPod goodness. Use the Action Clamp with GorillaPod Arm when you think you’re making a lot of quick tweaks, and you just want to bend the arm to get the position you want quickly.

GalleryImage_GorillaPodArm_01

But we also created the Action Clamp with Locking Arm which has this terrific locking arm that has two pivot points where each one can rotate 360 degrees as well as pivot 180 degrees to the left and right. Not only can you get even more crazy angles than the GorillaPod Arm, but the locking arm that locks the pivot balls in place helps give you a much more vibration-resistant, longer lasting hold for your GoPro cameras in case you want some alternative platforms like…

ActionClamp_Locking_PositionAnyAngle

 

We’d love to hear what you think of the new Action Series line, and how’d you use them. Tag your photos and videos on Twitter and Instagram with #whatsyourangle or #gorillapod so we can check out your shots! Who knows some lucky winners might be the beneficiaries of some cool gear in the near future (*ahem*).

 

Behind the Scenes: Creating Album Art

By | Artist Profile, delightful design, Gorillapod | No Comments

Ashlan Nathens, or ‘scribblegraph’ as he is now known, is an independent artist from Perth, Western Australia. He shared this great video of the behind the scenes process of him creating the album art for singer-songwriter Heather Fay. Not only did he use his GorillaPod SLR-Zoom to film the behind the scenes video, he also used it to photograph the artwork for the album. Super cool!

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To see more of Ash’s great illustrations check out his website!

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