Did you get any great presents for Christmas?  I did.  I got a new camera.  Although I’m still getting used to all the new features, already I love it!  It is the smallest camera I’ve ever had, even though it does a zillion things my older cameras never could.  My kids picked it out very carefully with my needs in mind, which are not overly technical, and lean more towards the it-must-be-easy-to-use category.

It has fun features that let me take pictures that don’t even look like pictures, they look like pencil or pen drawings.  One setting is called “punk”- it’s kinda strange, and I probably won’t be using that one very much.  But other settings are more than useful.  Of course, the camera takes video, and one setting actually stabilizes the picture! So if I’m a little shaky, or perhaps there is a wind, the video still comes out great- or at least better than it would otherwise.

I like to take pictures of landscapes and waterfalls.  So, I have to travel around to get shots.  Sometimes, I’m hiking a bit to get where I need to go, and I have to take my camera with me.  The kind of videos that I need of waterfalls require a bit of time, and there is no way I can hold the camera still for that long, so I also have to take a tripod with me.  This is where a good travel tripod comes in handy.  I used to think that just anything that would hold the camera up would do, until a friend showed me his Benro.  I guess you just don’t know what you’re missing until someone shows you.  Anyway, I obviously needed a better tripod, so I spent some time cruising around the net, visiting sites with camera reviews and camera equipment reviews, and finally decided that the one I wanted was, indeed, from Benrousa.com because of the obvious quality.

If you have a need for a travel tripod, I suggest you check them out- you may not even know what you’re missing!