Fisher Price Camera Tripod Modification – It’s Never Too Early Tutorial

This summer I took my 3 year old son to Big Sur for his first camping trip to show him the Milky Way. Remarkably he held on to this experience beyond expectation and he’s been talking about the Milky Way ever since. On top of that he’s really developed an interest in photography and cameras. I’m not sure how that happened, perhaps it is something in the water supply.  Fast forward to last week when he caught sight of my Joby tripod. I gave it to him to play with thinking it’d be one of the few items he could bend and try to destroy that wouldn’t worry myself or his mother. To my surprise he immediately dug up his retro Fisher-Price toy camera and proceeded to put it on the Joby tripod. The kicker is that he was telling me he was photographing the Milky Way. This would be a short story if it wasn’t for the fact that every day since he’s been setting up his camera and tripod all around the house to photograph different things at all times of the day.

If my little guy is going to get serious about make believe photography I felt it was my parental duty to make sure that he was going to develop good habits. To put it bluntly no one in my household is going to take sub-par make believe photos and to avert that we needed a secure way to fasten his camera to the Joby tripod. When I explained the dilemma to my son he was eager to take me up on my offer to modify his camera.

Here for your entertainment is the Fisher-Price camera tripod modification:
(Have a great Christmas!)

The Fisher-Price rubberband mount wasn’t cutting it. For simple shots sure it worked, but….	The rubberband mount worked well enough for level shots, but not for all shots.
Any non-level use of the camera resulted in camera instability.	We were pumped to fix the problem and even more so because we weren’t using toy drills.
Just before we started the modification. Things would never be the same again.	To create a stable mount we had to drill a hole in the bottom of the camera to install the Joby base plate.
Looks good lets try it out	Making sure that the base plate was installed as level as possible we put it to the test.
Our first test was a positive one, but what does the photographer think?	My little photographer was quite content with the new tripod mount. Now he’s on his way to good make believe photography technique.