Tripod Collars and Feet

With heavy lenses, it’s best to support the camera/lens combination from the lens. This is true whether or not you’re handholding the combination or whether it is mounted to a tripod. You want to avoid unsupported weight hanging off the front of the camera’s lens mount. With smaller lenses (up through the f/1.8 S primes and the mid-range zooms), this typically isn’t an issue. But with heavier and longer lenses with significant mass, it is.

Most of the Nikon telephoto lenses have unremovable tripod collars. The feet on these lenses with tripod collars are replaceable, though. Most of us have two problems with Nikon’s own feet: (1) they are not Arca-Swiss compatible; and on some (2) they tend to dismount unexpectedly due to an easily moved release lever.

You can find a number of third party feet these days:

Some lenses that you might want a tripod mount for don’t have tripod collars, thus no tripod mount. Third party solutions have appeared for this:

iShoot also makes tripod collars for some of the Nikkor PC-E lenses, available on Amazon.

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text and images © 2023 Thom Hogan — All Rights Reserved


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