Tripods in India?

I will be visiting Delhi, Srinagar and Leh in the second half of this month (July). I am taking my small JVC video camera that I use for professional work here in South Africa, as well as a Canon DSLR to record travel images. Could anyone advise me if tripods are a problem in India? I have a small one that can strap on to a back pack.

No, using tripod should not be a problem during your travel, as most of the place permit its use! You will have to keep it inside your backpack wherever it is not permitted, like some museum and at some monuments.

But, you will not be able to hand carry it during you air-travel!

Thanks Prakaant, I appreciate getting your info. I'll pack the small tripod ...

We have found small tripods extremely useful in India. But I'm afraid we have to warn you that they are not permitted everywhere. Many of the most important tourist venues do not permit them at all or require a ponderous bureaucratic procedure for obtaining permits. In the Ajanta caves, for instance, we were not permitted to use any sort of "stand", and I was nearly beaten with a lathi stick in Khajuraho for attempting to convert my (permitted) walking staff into a monopod.

Indeed, many if not all of the ASI (Archaeological Survey of India) sites limit or prohibit tripods. It is sometimes theoretically possible to apply for a permit to use one. Knowing we needed one for Ajanta, we applied two months in advance by mail. When we received no reply, we applied in person at the relevant ASI district office. After much rooting in stacks and stacks of paper (India works on hard copy records and pays no attention to anything electronic) the terribly polite and affable bureaucrat found our request and promised immediate action – but we would receive permission a day after our itinerary obliged us to leave! (To be fair, the bureaucrats are thorough: we indeed finally received hard copy permission by mail at home in the States something like two months after the date we'd applied for.)

We encountered something of the same runaround when trying to get permission to use a tripod in the National Museum of India in Delhi. We could in fact get permission, but only by speaking with the director, who was away on business until well after we were to leave Delhi. This happened twice. In the end we shot using all the usual steadying tricks, leaning against columns and walls and such, with the usual qualified successes.

I note also that you are shooting video and do so professionally. Be advised that the camera fees for using video at nearly all Indian sites are exorbitant. I recall their being something on the order of ten times the cost of a still camera permit. And for heaven's sake don't let on that you are a professional! India is so twitchy about the notion that some foreigner might actually be working without permission on their soil, and on a tourist visa at that, that professional writers are nervous about keeping a common, garden variety travel journal.

I found much the same. You have to make a judgement call as to whether the weight is worth it. Three highlights, one is long distance candid shots (handholding a 1000 lens is a trifle tedious), another is art (no talent for me), and one that could be handy for scholars is copying books, etc. on the fly. Gotta use extreme high def B&W and a motor. Worth a light weight tripod if you incline toward any of those. Forgot the most important, group photos with you in it.!

I neglected to mention that you might find attitudes toward photography in India quixotic. Why can I photo here and not there? Sometimes the reason is a finely honed concern for security on the part of the military: you can't photograph the attractive boats a Sassoon Docks in Mumbai, for example, because way the hell over there is a naval base. Mumbai is a special case, of course, because of its proven vulnerability. The Taj Group, who own an apartment block some blocks from the famous Taj Hotel, send armed guards tearing across a busy avenue to prevent tourists from snapping the architecturally distinctive building – the company are understandably nervous about the intentions of foreigners behaving oddly, or in fact behaving any way at all.

On the other hand, enforcement of photography restrictions is highly variable. At the Taj Hotel itself, we were forbidden to take shots of the back of the building. My wife had to pull the little-white-haired-old-lady-blubbering-because-she-can't-have-her-tourist-snap routine to be allowed to shoot one photo. But on the front side of the Taj, exposed to the Gateway of India and a gazillion tourists, no one complained about our shooting away.

We ran into differential enforcement in Hampi, too. It turns out that one is technically forbidden to shoot work at any ASI dig site. We didn't know that and wandered smack into the middle of one large dig, shooting away merrily, photographing the meanest navvies and even the archaeologists in conference; and no one raised a question. But at another dig site on the same day we were accosted by an irate archaeologist who furiously told us we were forbidden to shoot the archaeological work. Happily we were able to show him on our viewscreen that all of our shots were taken of the building thataway, with our backs to the actual digging, and he let us get on with it. (We didn't scroll back far enough to show the diggings themselves, and we sorta thought maybe he didn't need to know about that). Once he calmed down, he seemed a reasonable man. I therefore thought to ask him, most politely, if he knew why we weren't permitted to take pictures of ASI digs. His answer? "Because there's a rule against it!"

The point is that photography in India can include adventures (read, pains in the ass) that you might not have anticipated. Like all the rest of India, you have to develop the mindset of going with the flow.

One final note: my wife reminds me that we originally contacted the ASI for permission to use a tripod in Ajanta by e-mail, not snail mail. The affable bureaucrat was searching through a meter high stack of pending requests to come up with their own hard-copy printout of our e-mail, which may or may not have been saved somewhere digitally. Paper counts, computers don't.

I took a small gorilla pod for my Nikon DSLR and did not get it past security at a single monument in India.

ASI tripod permits can be found the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.

I have managed to infiltrate ASI sites with a full Manfrotto tripod with ball head and a Gigapan Pro rig on top, but once the attendants have finished their afternoon nap they are liable to raise a fuss.

You can usually get away with a monopod, if you are discrete. There are countless layabouts who pounce on anyone with a camera demanding bakshish - here again a monopod comes in useful.

Rings so very much the case. I pull a camera out at a rail station to capture the steam locomotive. I am strictly forbidden to do so. However, there must be a proviso that he can take the picture with me beside the engine because... The madness is also the delight..

Thanks everyone for your input. It certainly sounds like a minefield out there as far as cameras and tripods are concerned - never had these kinds of restrictions in places like Madagascar, Botswana, Namibia and Mozambique! Although I do video productions for a living, this gig is just a family holiday and I mostly want to cut a little show to record our adventures. I think that I will pack a small tripod in a backpack and use it for local colour shots (and leave the monements etc for my wife to snap with her cellphone). I hate doing handheld run & gun shots with video because they inevitably end up shaky. Thanks again for the advice.

If you think cameras and tripods are bad, wait'll you try railroads.

Sounds like a plan. Enjoy!

I have a DSLR 3100 Nikon and looking for a tripod, (a) two options have come economical Benro T 880ex, Rs 1650, Vanguard ESPOD 203 AP Rs 3300 which one is better (b) any good source.

Regrettably sir, this is WRONG information!

Almost all monuments in India (large or small) prohibit the use of tripods (and monopods are included in this definition) and you will not be able to take them past the entrance gate, unless you have a permit from the Archaeological Survey office in Delhi. This permit is almost impossible to get, due to government stupidity / incompetence.

And Indians are corrupt enough without having foreigners attempt to introduce more bribes into the system.

PS. I have had no trouble carrying my Manfrotto on domestic flights in India!

Thanks for corroborating what we've covered earlier.

If you pick your spot, you can sneak almost any photo equipment in provided it is well camouflaged:

http://gigapan.com/gigapans/101964