My Groundpod — From Frying Pan to Photography Gear

Who says great photography equipment has to be expensive? Sometimes, the best solutions are hiding in your kitchen.

Sometimes the best photography gear is the equipment you build yourself. My DIY groundpod for wildlife photography started with an old frying pan and a simple idea: getting my camera as close to the ground as possible for a more intimate perspective on wildlife.
Getting down to eye level with wildlife can make an enormous difference to a photograph. And when I say getting down, I mean really down — sometimes just a few centimeters above the ground. Of course, you can buy specially designed groundpods for this purpose. But where’s the fun in that? My solution was considerably cheaper. An old, inexpensive frying pan. Yes, you read that correctly.

DIY Groundpod for Wildlife Photography – How I Built Mine

A Little Creativity and Some Simple Tools

The idea was simple: turn an ordinary frying pan into a stable, low-profile platform for my camera and telephoto lens. To make it work, I used pop rivets to attach a small metal bracket in the center of the pan. This provides a mounting point for my Sirui PH-20 gimbal head, allowing it to rotate and giving me the freedom to follow wildlife without having to reposition the entire groundpod.
But a shiny frying pan isn’t exactly the most discreet piece of equipment to bring into the wilderness.
So I drilled a series of holes all the way around the edge of the pan and tied pieces of frayed paracord through them. The loose fibers create a rough, natural-looking camouflage fringe that helps break up the outline of the pan and blend it into the surrounding vegetation.
Nothing particularly sophisticated. Just a little imagination, a drill, some rivets, and a handful of paracord.

Getting Down to Nature’s Level

With the gimbal mounted and the camouflage in place, my homemade groundpod is ready for action.
The wide base provides stability, while the low profile allows me to position my camera close to the ground. The gimbal makes it easier to track animals moving through the scene, and on suitable surfaces, I can even slide the entire setup into a better position.
Whether I’m photographing birds resting on the ground or small mammals moving through the grass, this low perspective can completely transform an image. Instead of looking down on the animal, I’m suddenly seeing the world from something much closer to its own point of view. And that can make a photograph feel far more intimate.
Getting close to the ground can completely change the perspective of a wildlife photograph. The same principle applies on water, where I use my floating photography hide to capture wildlife from an entirely different angle.

Not Pretty, But It Works

I’ll admit it. My groundpod probably won’t win any industrial design awards.
It started life as a cheap frying pan, after all. But it does exactly what I need it to do, and it cost next to nothing compared to commercially manufactured alternatives. There’s something wonderfully satisfying about creating useful photography equipment from materials that would otherwise have been forgotten or thrown away. And every time I use it, I’m reminded that creativity isn’t limited to what happens behind the camera. Sometimes, it begins in the workshop. Or, in this particular case, the kitchen.
Because sometimes, the best photography accessory isn’t found in a camera store. It’s found at the bottom of a kitchen cupboard.