Mobile Photography Weekly

- Hey everybody, welcome back to Mobile Photography Weekly. Sean Duggan here, and you know after many years of photographing with camera phones, I have finally acquired a selfie stick. Actually, I have acquired two selfie sticks. And you know, true confession time, I'm not really a selfie photographer, and certainly not a selfie stick photographer. But when I went into researching which ones to get, I did so from a photographer gear head perspective, because I wanted to find some selfie sticks that were useful for something other than just selfies.

So this first one here is made by Yoozon, and it's pretty cool. It extends out to about 26 inches I think, so that's pretty cool. You can rotate this, and you can rotate the mount here, if you want to have the camera oriented vertically or horizontally. It's got a little spring-loaded clamp here, to put the phone in there. And that's you know, pretty tight in there. And then you have a Bluetooth remote here, which is pretty useful for selfie sticks because that way you can trigger them from the handle.

But it's also useful for another purpose, especially with this particular selfie stick, because in addition to being a selfie stick, in the handle are some very simple tripod legs. So what's nice about this is that you can use this here if you were you know, needing to make a YouTube video, you just wanted a simple camera stand wherever you're at, you could have that in your camera bag or in your purse, and that would do the trick. So that's pretty useful I thought. And then I decided to take it a step further and figure out well, what else could I get? How could I take the selfie stick a little bit further? So I found this one, which is the Fugetek FT-569.

And I was drawn to this one even though it's obviously a little bit more robust than a standard selfie stick. Looks more like a light stand, actually. But I was drawn to this because of it's extensibility. This one here goes out to 51 inches, which is quite a lot of range if you needed to get the camera a lot farther away, if you had a big group shot to do, or you just needed to get it up higher. The other thing I like about this one here is that instead of a spring-loaded clamp, it actually has a clamp that you screw down, which gives you a very secure mount.

Which is important if you're gonna have an expensive phone out at that sort of length. If you look at this, you know it is really secure. Very, very robust. It also has the tripod legs, so it's doubling as a tripod. Got a Bluetooth remote there. And I think the thing to keep in mind about selfie sticks is that they don't have to be used as just selfie sticks, you can use them for other things as well. Whether it's getting up to a high elevation, such as this one here. Or maybe even extending this out over an area that you couldn't actually walk across, or didn't want to walk across, and getting the camera down for a low-down angle.

So if you are interested in pursuing selfie sticks and getting one for your own use, the thing to ask yourself is how do you want to use it? How big does it need to be? Do you want it to be small to fit into a purse or your pocket, or do you want a mid-size one? Or do you need something that is really big and a lot more robust? There's a lot of choices out there.