Most useless accessory?

I just spotted an advert for a 'Safari tripod leg-warmer' at £39 UK (about $58 US). It comes in a brown camo finish.

Aside from the fact that a length of pipe insulation foam and some gaffer tape would achieve the same function for a tiny fraction of the price; does not the combination of the words 'safari' and 'leg-warmer' seem something of an oxymoron?

The short length of camo fabric would clash with, and do nothing to disguise the rest of the tripod BTW.

Who the .... would buy such a product?

Any nominations for your most useless, daftest, or overpriced photo accessory?

.. and that's just one leg-warmer? I had to google to look at one (and the link I clicked wanted 64.95 uk quid!); I read that it 'Insulates, protects and enhances ergonomics'; so it stops your precious tripod getting scratched, and stops it feeling cold to the touch, I guess.

Back in the '80s, brightly-coloured knitted leg-warmers on a tripod (three of them, of course) would have been funny, at least the first time you saw them. Of course, mostly they're worn wrinkled down near the tripod's ankles.

I don't know about over-priced, but one useless item that comes to mind is the Canon A-1's Action Grip; it stops you getting at the battery compartment, and it was designed to fall off and get lost. When I still had one (the grip; I still have the camera), I didn't notice it making the camera easier to hold anyhow.

I still have a Nikon pistol grip somewhere. True, with a motordrive attached it made one handed operation of the camera possible - except you'd need the wrist strength of a gorilla to handle the top-heavy combo of, say, F2 + MD-2 + any sizeable lens.

Just add a DL-1 Photomic illuminator to complete the lunacy.

Just add a DL-1 Photomic illuminator to complete the lunacy.

Actually, the grip with the old 50-300 and any F Model up to 3 with basic motor drive worked pretty well, particularly with the strap attached to the lens. Still have that setup, of course it has been surpassed by current cameras and lenses. Not that long ago I picked up an electronic shutter release cord for the grip - may try it with F 4 or 5 and one of the longer modern zooms. The photomic illuminator was never of much use, except in theatre or concerts, where it was quite helpful. You could get a similar effect for free with a scrap of white index card taped to the top of the meter at an angle behind the window.

but arent safaris usually in warm climates?

i love to see free enterpise in action. people will buy almost anything, even rubber dog shit.

That reminds me of something I saw in an old book; it recommended making a loop of string to fit tightly round one or both of your feet and your camera. I thought I'd be likely to move my foot and pull the camera out of my hand.

- I think the author of that book might have been pulling your leg!

Actually I've found a "chain pod" while of little use these days, does help a tiny bit with steadying a camera if you use it right. I never got more than about a stop out of it, and now with VR and switchable ISO I don't bother. Of course it's not the kind of thing one needs to spend money for either. But if you're traveling light, it's not such a bad thing to throw in.

As for tripod leg warmers, if your tripod's tubes are within a certain range, the absolute berries in this is not pipe insulation but the cheap, foam material sold for bicycle handlebars. Not used on the better bikes, but often seen on low-end drop bars, the foam can still occasionally be found in inexpensive packets. Use dishwashing soap to slide it on. It's fairly durable and dense. A nice tight fit with no damage.

I think my most useless accessory is a parallax compensating mount for viewfinder cameras. It's in a nice little box, made of solid quality metal, chrome plated. Lovely to behold, utterly useless. Among other things, it has no scale or way to modify its displacement. It's mitigated some because it cost almost nothing at some closeout sale many many years ago. I keep it now just because it's unique and shiny. I've had it for probably 40 years, and never once used it.

A close second was what seemed like a very clever idea: a jointed diffuser for the built-in flash on modern DSLR's. Stick it in the shoe and adjust it so that its little screen softens the flash. The one drawback of this ingenious device is that it doesn't work. My recollection is that it cost something around $20 and it's not made out of nice shiny metal.

I often wondered why nobody made a clip-on mirror to enable bounce with a popup flash.

I once quickly fashioned one from a 'tinfoil' takeaway food container. It worked surprisingly well - within the limits of the small amount of flash power available. The big drawback was that it didn't survive being stuffed into the gadget bag for future use.

I often wondered why nobody made a clip-on mirror to enable bounce with a popup flash.

 

I once quickly fashioned one from a 'tinfoil' takeaway food container. It worked surprisingly well - within the limits of the small amount of flash power available. The big drawback was that it didn't survive being stuffed into the gadget bag for future use.

Belatedly... I've done the same, with a piece of aluminium foil that was wrapping something. And my one was pre-crinkled, so it survived reasonably. But I don't really use flash enough to justify it.

I often wondered why nobody made a clip-on mirror to enable bounce with a popup flash.

 

I once quickly fashioned one from a 'tinfoil' takeaway food container. It worked surprisingly well - within the limits of the small amount of flash power available. The big drawback was that it didn't survive being stuffed into the gadget bag for future use.

If bouncing is feasible (I guess with the high ISO it is) then camera maker should make the built in flash bounceable. Personally I never use the built in flash.

I use the flash for brief shots when I'm just trying to capture something which would otherwise be in dim light, and I don't have much time. (In my case, I've usually been shooting a tiddlywinks tournament all day in available light, partly because a flash would distract players, and then I use the flash for the rushed trophy presentation when everyone's trying to go home.) Otherwise it's mostly been a trigger for off-camera flashes - and I do have the SG-31R, but rarely bother. With the D850 I'll have to screw something into the hotshoe, annoyingly - be that my tiny Nissin Di28 (which is roughly in the SB-300 class but fits in a bag better) or the radio triggers I just picked up. I don't use it much, but I'm one of the people who wish Nikon had either kept it on the D850 or at least integrated a radio AWL trigger - or an IR CLS trigger. (Nikon also really need to make a radio AWL hotshoe, otherwise they're just printing money for the third parties.)

You can actually tilt the RX100 flash up to act as bounce flash (due to the way it's hinged). I'm sad Nikon never found a way to do the same.

I use the flash for brief shots when I'm just trying to capture something which would otherwise be in dim light, and I don't have much time. (In my case, I've usually been shooting a tiddlywinks tournament .

Tinsley Green??

Tinsley Green??

I realised that might have been a slight non-sequitur for people who don't know me. :-) I'm secretary of the English Tiddlywinks Association - I claim to have the most money spent on taking photos of a sport relative to the actual budget of the sport. Mostly because if you put a white mat with a load of small dark plastic disks on the focal plane (with someone's head above it) and try to shoot in a dark room with rubbish in the background so you like wide apertures, you have the kind of recipe for LoCA and relevant edge sharpness that makes me grind my teeth a lot and throw way too much money at lens manufacturers.

But no, mostly Cambridge - Tinsley Green is the marbles folk, and they probably take it more seriously; I've only been playing since 1992. (I do, pleasingly, live near Winkfield, though.)

I suspect the marbles people might have the same problems with dark pubs and a dislike of people firing flashes while they're trying to play, though.

Okay, here's a list of shame:

Accessories I've owned but literally never got around to using:

• Digital remote cord (MC-36A knock-off) - I have the basic cable too, which doesn't need batteries, and recent bodies have integrated the interval shooting
  
• Marumi ring flash (Canon) - I switched system before using this much, but it's small enough that it barely fits a substantial lens
  
• Polaroid(!) battery grip for D700 - bought in my D700+D800 days, and 8fps was just never useful enough to use the older body; I do have the grip for the D850 and haven't used it, but I've only had it for a couple of weeks...
  
• Various portable flash modifiers - generally too floppy to appeal to me, so I tend to use flash either bare or with an umbrella or full-size diffuser
  
• Star tracking mount and LPR filters - still intending to use these, but British weather, workload and orange skies make it tricky to schedule
  
• Drop-in polariser for 200 f/2 - I just don't tend to use the 200 f/2 outside...
  
• Macro focus rail - I just never got around to it, although now I have a 4-4.5x macro it might get wheeled out for focus stacking
  
• Various ND grads - a pain to set up, digital dynamic range is normally enough to reduce the benefit (with exposure bracketing as an option if not), and a line across the image is a very approximate tool for tone mapping
  
• Various lens protective bags that aren't perfect fits and don't attach well to some of my main bags
  
• Film retriever - I just don't shoot enough 35mm for it to have come up
  

Accessories I've owned but very rarely used:

• Lightning trigger - my budget one tends to be slow/insensitive enough that it still often misses the lightning, and since it needs charging before use it only really works if I'm paying a lot of attention to the weather report; my recent Nikon Wednesday lightning shots were taken by hand
  
• Yellow/blue polariser - introduces an awkward colour shift that needs correction, and then it's a bit on the garish side - plus I have it in an inconvenient format
  
• Various colour filters - I don't shoot enough film (monochrome or otherwise) to justify carting them around most of the time (although I occasionally use an infrared filter)
  
• Modified Nikon TC-16A - cool autofocussing teleconverter, but the image quality impact was bad enough (and AF range limited enough on a 500 f/4) that I didn't find it useful
  
• 35mm and 65mm tilt-shift lenses - a bit of a pain to use, and not optically brilliant enough to justify it most of the time to me; they're third party and not worth enough to be worth my getting rid of them, just in case (I'm not going to list all the lenses that I've "upgraded" over time)
  
• Monopods - I just rarely find the stability benefit worth the pain of carting them about, although I've used them to dangle my camera above head height; I have very cheap ones
  
• Hotshoe bubble levels - I've used them, but I normally just use the digital one in recent cameras (or line up the viewfinder frame lines with the horizon)
  
• SG-31R IR blocking panel - fits in the hotshoe so the on-body flash doesn't affect the image while still optically triggering remote flashes; I've found the impact of the integrated flash to be negligible, but then I don't shoot much flash and I'm not picky when I do - and if you're going to put something in the hotshoe, you may as well have something better triggering (so I've recently bought cheap radio triggers)
  
• Gorillapods - they'll only just hold my SLR (even the big one), and they're bigger than they look, so I rarely find it worth taking them
  
• PC flash cable - mine is annoyingly not threaded and falls out of the socket on my Nikon bodies; I can use it to trigger my cheap background flashes (which don't know about Nikon's pre-flash TTL system and so get confused when optically triggering), but I don't do flash enough to justify the annoyance of messing with wiring most of the time
  

Few of these are genuinely useless, most are just useless to me, or sufficiently useless that I very rarely use them (and some, I do solemnly swear, I'll get around to using at some point). Some, I appreciate, are relatively invaluable to others who shoot differently.

Andrew--you might look into a Paramount PC cord conditioner tool. These cords tend to loosen up over time and some of them are loose out of the box. I've had one of these for years and they really help.

Thanks - I think I just crimped the end with some pliers, but I'll have a look if there's an official thing for doing this. I gather there's such a thing as a PC cord with a threaded end (since the camera has threads for such a thing), which would have helped - but I don't use flash enough to have bothered finding one!

I've found this to be pretty useless...

It's a winding crank to fit the early non-"A" Hasselblad backs. Those have a fold-out half moon crank that you use to advance the film to frame "1"(via the peephole in the back) and then you flip the crank CCW a little bit to start the frame counter. It then folds back down flush.

The problem is that this add-on crank spins all the time when your'e winding the film, and it's all to easy to snag it on something and reset the frame counter.

The later "A" series backs integrate a crank, but it only functions to advance the film during loading and then doesn't turn. Of course, on the "A" backs(automatic) the frame counter starts automatically.

I realised that might have been a slight non-sequitur for people who don't know me. :) I'm secretary of the English Tiddlywinks Association - I claim to have the most money spent on taking photos of a sport relative to the actual budget of the sport. Mostly because if you put a white mat with a load of small dark plastic disks on the focal plane (with someone's head above it) and try to shoot in a dark room with rubbish in the background so you like wide apertures, you have the kind of recipe for LoCA and relevant edge sharpness that makes me grind my teeth a lot and throw way too much money at lens manufacturers.

 

But no, mostly Cambridge - Tinsley Green is the marbles folk, and they probably take it more seriously; I've only been playing since 1992. (I do, pleasingly, live near Winkfield, though.)

 

I suspect the marbles people might have the same problems with dark pubs and a dislike of people firing flashes while they're trying to play, though.

Of course, that’s where they loose their marbles, excuse my error!