Handles and grips

- One of the things I'd encourage you to pick up is some sort of handle or grip for your camera. After all, palming a camera like this and trying to shoot doesn't work very well. It's going to be shaky. It's going to be difficult. Sure, you could take a selfie, but it doesn't work really well. You want to get the camera out there and have some stability. Now, I showed you this one just a little bit ago. This works great for underwater shooting. It's got a wrist strap, but you can use this in other shooting conditions as well. Remember, we can easily attach that. Put the thumbscrew in there.

And because it can angle, this makes it simple. So maybe we're going here, and we want to just point the camera in front of us, a little bit like a flashlight. Well that makes it easy to get a pointed view shot. Need to reverse it? Well now you've got it, and you've got a little extra grip to put it in front of you so that you can actually shoot what you're doing. Now this is more to give you that hands-free shooting. I've got it in my hand and if I need to, I can let go to get my hands back and be safe. But if you really need to extend your reach, you have a couple of choices.

GoPro offers something that they call a GoPro 3-Way, and it's designed to serve three different purposes. First up, it makes kind of a bit of a bulky handle, so just like this one, you can hold this in your hand and use it as a grip. That's fine, but it's not super comfortable, but it does work. Additionally, if you need to, you can go ahead and open this up. And now you have a little bit of an extended reach. We'll just attach that to the end.

And you'll notice that I can go ahead, reach way overhead, reach in front of me, hold it out to talk, extend my reach, out to the side, there's all sorts of things you could do because this adds an extra two feet or so to your reach, which can be helpful. One of the other things I really like though is that this is bendable. So if you need it to point back at yourself, you've got it. Now what I like is on the bottom, we have an additional option and it's hidden in the handle.

Take that out, let's just close this up for a second. And what this gives you is a small tripod. Now your camera can be set up and ready to roll. Need to stand it on a desk? You got it. And you can still combine those features, so if needed, we can open this up and set the camera up to get it a few feet off the ground. And I've used this while shooting in the desert sometimes for B-roll. You could easily drop this on the ground and get a shot.

Now a high wind comes up, this isn't nearly as stable as some of the other tripods we've talked about, but as far as versatility goes, in one small container, you've got the ability for a grip, for a pole, or a small tripod, and this gives you a lot of options. Now I would recommend picking up some sort of pole that's going to work with your GoPro. There's a wide range out there. I own five or six of these depending upon the activity, and it just depends on what you need. Maybe you want one that is very flexible or could extend the reach.

This particular one is what I use diving. It is actually designed to get wet, and it's a telescoping pole. There we go. And what I really like about the end here is that it doesn't need the little nut that usually comes with most GoPro cameras. I can now attach that, and it's got a hard wire built into the metal catch on the other side and we're good to go. You'll notice that this gives you a significant extended reach.

And it does have the same safety chain here that I could put on my wrist to keep things where I need it. I'd use something like this for underwater diving. It allows me to extend my reach several feet below me, sometimes to chase fish or to see other things, or while doing something like skiing, same idea. You can easily extend the camera and get it out in front or to reach high over a crowd at a concert or an event to get a better shot. All of these are just designed to give you flexibility. Now what's nice about all of them too is that they are designed to collapse.

So by using the telescoping part, we can just push that down there. There we go. There we go. And it's still small enough to easily fit into my GoPro backpack.