While in Panama City talking about the Panama Canal with a terrific guy/terrific photographer named Joshua Flannigan, Josh showed me the time-lapse video he created of a few ships locking down in the Miraflores lock. I loved it — and loved the device in which he held his iPhone to shoot them.
Josh traveled with a brilliant device — a light-weight, tiny $20 device called the iStabilizer Mount, which simply held his iPhone (or most other smartphones) in place and screws onto any standard tripod.
I actually loved Josh’s photos and canal enthusiam so much that I brought him out on a Panama Canal tugboat and we got lots of great photos and time-lapse videos.
The iStabilizer Mount on the iStabilizer Flex tripod.
Now that I am back in the states, I have the iStabilizer Flex™ — the same Mount but with a detachable, incredibly light-weight flexible-legged tripod. The iStabilizer Flex legs are well padded so they won’t scratch anything and have more traction to stay put. The tripod legs are wider than my tiny thin travel tripod, but the extra space they’d take up in a backpack is not huge — while the boost they give your photo-shooting is.
Oh, another thing iStabilizer did right is that it works with most (maybe all) cases — and a case like the Otter Box can be important to a traveler.
For the larger smartphone devices that are recently out, such as the Galaxy Note II, iStabilizer folks have released the Mount XL which fits all smartphones currently on the market.
You can purchase iStabilizer smartphone mounts from Dr. Bott. Dr. Bott has been one of my favorite and trusted Apple-related product vendors for as long as it has been doing business.