I talk a lot about my successes as a landscape and fine art photographer.  It seems only fitting to do so.  I don’t often talk much about when I fail.  It’s not comfortable to do so.  However, today I’m talking about a rather painful failure I just had on my last photo shoot and how you can avoid making the same mistake with gravity.

After every photo shoot, I spend some time taking down my equipment and putting it away safely.  I don’t want it to be damaged before my next shoot.  Besides, it’s expensive to replace.  I want to take good care of it.

Well, after this photo shoot, I decided I would let gravity help me collapse the telescoping legs of my tripod as I was packing it up for the day.  It seemed like a good idea at the time (famous last words by the way).

All was going well as I had more than one segment recessed.  Then I let the last one go and found out the hard way that I had my thumb in the way.  It hurt.  It really hurt.  I had just pinched my thumb between 2 pieces of the tripod with a flush surface.  To add to my misery, I had also let the top accelerate down before impacting my unfortunate digit.

I took a look a couple minutes later and discovered that I had developed a blood blister on the pad of my left thumb.  It’s in a most inconvenient spot as it makes some normal tasks unpleasant thanks to putting pressure there.

My brother told me that I had a photographer’s equivalent of Garand or M1 thumb.  If you’re into shooting sports, you probably know what that is.  If not, it’s when you’re not careful with the semi-auto action of a rifle and it snaps back into your thumb.  It’s equally if not way more painful.  Unfortunately, this injury also looks as unpleasant.

So, my advice to avoid the unpleasantness of blood blisters on your digits when packing away photography gear is to either keep your fingers out of the way or not use gravity to help you collapse something like telescoping tripod legs.