• Mood: accomplished
• Music: the sound of my own mind being awesome

How to not spend $600 on a grip for your Nikon d800

Ever since I started using an SLR all my cameras have had vertical grips on them, the grips have extra batteries and some of them have an extra release button. The one for the d100 actually had a freaking MEMO RECORDER in it that attached a .wav file to whatever photo you'd just taken so you could take a photo then say "Mrs. Betsy Johnson, 77 from Memphis TN waving a flag at the Peanut Brittle Parade" and have all your notes in the field. I've no idea why they got rid of that.

Anyway, I went to order the grip for my d800 and the thing is freaking six hundred dollars which is absurd because it's got about nine dollars worth of electronics in it. All I really wanted it for was to hold the extra battery since I never use the vertical shutter (plus, in all honesty it just freaking looks WRONG without the thing). I looked around on the Interwebs and nobody's making an aftermarket grip for the d800 yet (someone's eventually going to make one for about forty bucks).

I had a md10, the vertical grip for the Nikon d200 in a drawer, someone borrowed my d200 about two years ago and never gave it back so it was lonely and useless. The d200 grip has a battery connector that protrudes up into the camera body which meant it wouldn't physically fit on the d800, but it seemed a similar size and the tripod screw was in the right place. So I smashed the protruding bit off with a hammer and it screws right onto the bottom of the d800 and, take this nikon, you can hold TWO extra batteries in that thing -- they won't power the camera, but my d700 grip never rolled over from one battery to the other, you had to take the stupid grip off and swap them out when your power ran down.

So I'm counting this as a win.




Clickenzee to Embiggen!


(The cool duct tape is the result of a camera dropping accident at a Dresden Dolls show years ago, not only do I have a vertical grip but I get to CARRY OVER THE STREET CRED from my old camera.)

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