My main tripod is a Gitzo GT3532S, I’ve been using the spiked feet and adding the sand feet to the spikes when I shoot on the beach. I often look in my bag for the sand feet only to find I’ve left them at home or in the car.

I usually set the tripod up in the water, and I’ll bracket my exposures, with the spiked feet the tripod sinks further down as the water goes back out, requiring me to reset the composition after each wave.

I recently stumbled across these ‘rock claws’ while looking at some other gear on the Leofoto website, a quick google search turned up some positive reviews so I decided to give them a try.

I want something that I can use for all types of terrain instead of swapping parts around. I’ve now had a chance to try them on sand, rocks and dirt.

Sand: they don’t sink like the spikes do, I didn’t test them back to back with the sand feet so I don’t have a direct comparison, but they are good enough at holding their position that I wouldn’t bother swapping them out for the sand feet on beach shoots.

Edit: After about 15 beach shoots with these I’ve found that if you drive them into the sand about 4 inches down when you set up, they will maintain their position. Driving them down also makes the tripod legs spread out a bit so I allow for this by angling the legs in a bit before driving the feet into the sand.

Rocks: They are excellent at gripping the rocks, I’ve used them on dry granite boulders and wet rocks on a beach with waves breaking over the tripod legs, they did an excellent job of grabbing onto the rocks.

Dirt: With the spiked feet I often gives the tripod a good push to get the spikes to dig into the dirt, especially if I’m pushing the tripod through some foliage. This is quite hard with the rock claws, and takes a bit more work to get the feet planted on the ground in some circumstances.

As the name suggests, these are unbeatable for setting up the tripod on rocks. There are some slight disadvantages on dirt, and they are probably not quite as good as sand feet for shooting on the beach under waves, but I can’t say for sure until I shoot with a mixture of feet on the tripod.

I did attempt to use these inside to shoot some images in a lightbox for a blog post, not a good idea as they wreak havoc on hard floors and get caught on the carpet.

Overall I find this setup a much beter option than swapping between spikes and sand feet in the field.

These will be staying on my Gitzo.