Antique Camera Tripods

We stayed with some friends in central Nevada for whom the term "packrat" is perhaps a bit too mild of a term.  When he realized that I had neglected to bring a tripod for the Pentax to shoot the eclipse, he pulled out a quite remarkable camera tripod.  It was all aluminum, and made in the USA by Star Mfg. of New York City.  It seems quite sturdy, and since he doesn't do any serious photography, and it cost him all of $2 when he bought it in a thrift store, long, long ago, he generously gave it to me.  And then two more antique tripods before we could get away.  (Anything that I could do to reduce the entropic disaster that is the Garage of Chaos is a good thing.)

Not quite as good a tripod is one labeled Red Accent which is missing the plate that modern tripods use to mount a camera.  It has the model designation VTR-60RA.  It is a bit stiff, probably from lack of use in recent decades, and is labeled as made in Taiwan.

The third one is also I think quite old.  The brand and model is Sunset LW-1000, and it is labeled as Made in Japan.  It isn't a particularly impressive tripod, but the fact that it is old style (not a separate plate) and made in Japan makes me suspect that it could be 1960s, and perhaps valuable to a collector.