The Shoulderpod S2 is presented as the first high quality handle-grip for holding your smartphone camera professionally. It’s also a building block for the top of the line X1, the Pro Rig.
Let’s start with the smaller grip, the S2. Designed by Shoulderpod, a small company from Barcelona, Spain, that designs and crafts professional equipment for mobile creatives and visual storytellers, the S2 fits virtually any mobile device thanks to its adjustable mechanism and wide rubber pads. It’s presented as a solid and portable solution, which may fit your needs today, but it’s no dead end, and it can grow with you in the future, as it is part of a modular solution. In fact, the whole Shoulderpod platform has been designed as a modular system. Start with one of the basic configurations and grow from there with additional parts and accessories. When traveling select only the parts you need and avoid carrying that heavy backpack full of unnecessary gear.
The concept is interesting and the price too: the S2 costs $39.99. There’s one more thing you’ll appreciate: the people that designed the product say that they “don’t like a world where products are designed to become useless after a short period of time. That’s why we offer replacements of most of our basic parts.”
The S2, in fact, can be a building block of a complete rig for your smartphone. Or, if that’s what you need, you can go directly to the X1, also announced this February. It is an advanced production rig that allows you to add professional microphones, light and extra batteries to your mobile camera. It can be quickly constructed for use as a handheld system, or for use with a tripod. Designed to slip easily into your backpack, the X1 is a fully adjustable system that will is fully compatible with other photo and video equipment, allowing you to turn your smartphone into a professional photo or video taking tool. The Shoulderpod X1 costs $119.99.
Besides these new products, the Shoulderpod range includes two other: the G1 and the R2. The G1 is a professional grip for mounting your smartphone on any tripod or rig. It also works as a stand for using it as a basic support when traveling. The G1 is fully adjustable, ultra secure and has been built to last a lifetime. The R2 is a multifunctional and compact rig that makes adding external microphones, lights or batteries to your mobile camera easy when on the move. Including the G1 grip and a pocket rig to allow you to take your filmmaking studio wherever you go, the R2 has been designed and crafted using aluminium and natural Sapeli hardwood.
A platform designed to be a modular system, Shoulderpod offers high quality products for photographers, filmmakers, journalists and travelers who want to tell their stories by using smartphones as a professional camera. On the company’s webpage “About us” one discovers that Shoulderpod are “a team of engineers, architects and designers with over 20 years experience in product design” that loves photography and filmmaking and “and as smartphones became better, we started using them more and more as one of our cameras”. Unfortunately, they add, “we couldn’t figure out how to hold them correctly … and so we thought, ‘what if we changed that?’ So in 2013 we transformed Tambakunda – our product design studio – into Shoulderpod.”