Morning Musings are back! Today I have a few general thoughts about tripods — not aimed at those who are already confirmed tripod users, but rather at those who find it hard to bother using them.

To start, let’s admit that one does not always need a tripod. For certain types of photography in which quick response is required and in which being too obviously a photographer can interfere with photographs, it is usually better to not use one. There are exceptions to every rule, but you are unlikely to want to use one for most street photography, for personal and family photography at home and on vacations, for certain kinds of portrait work, casual travel photography, and so on.

Let’s also agree that using a tripod is a burden, especially at first when one hasn’t accepted the extra trouble and when you haven’t yet developed instincts that make tripod use a lot more automatic before long. I’ll readily admit to being less than thrilled on about the 50th time that I must remove my tripod from the car, extend and lock the legs, level the thing, attach the camera, and only then make a photograph… after which I have to reverse the process: remove the camera, collapse the tripod legs, stow the thing once again. The slightly put-upon feeling diminishes as you get used to it, but it perhaps never goes away entirely. (The good news here is that the process of setting up and using the tripod does eventually become much quicker and much more automatic than it first seems.)

So, why use it then? There are more reasons than you might imagine.

Stability is an obvious advantage of the tripod. While you can, with care and practice, often hold a camera quite steadily and produce very sharp images when shooting handheld, you simply cannot eliminate all of the blur that comes when you hold the camera in your hands. And if you do happen to have very steady hands, you still will make mistakes that produce blur — working a bit too fast you may introduce a bit of camera vibration in some shots and you will reduce the number of successful results. A good tripod used correctly can virtually eliminate all camera motion and vibration in most cases. This is especially important when doing some kinds of photography that intrinsically require longer shutter speeds. This obviously includes night photography. Low light, low ISO, long lenses, and small apertures often require landscape photographers to use rather long shutter speeds.

Compromises in terms of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO are less likely to be necessary with a tripod. When shooting handheld it is necessary to keep the shutter speed short enough to increase the odds of a sharp photograph, but in all but ideal light this often means compensating by using a larger aperture and/or raising the ISO. These are not always bad things, but one inevitably gets into situations in which the need to keep shutter speed high trumps other considerations when it comes to making these choices.

Accurate focus is easier and more reliably obtained when the camera is locked to a tripod. Modern auto-focus systems are, indeed, very good. You can rely on them a lot of the time, especially when your subject is fairly straightforward. However, as focus becomes more challenging — tiny subjects, subjects at varying focus distances, need to control depth of field — it becomes trickier to rely on autofocus when shooting handheld. With the camera on a tripod you have several advantages. If you do use autofocus, you can be selective about which focus points are active and how they are positioned over your subject — perhaps activating one that is directly over the subject and deactivating others. In many cases it is better to use manual focus, especially if your camera has a “live view” feature that lets you zoom in on any area of the scene for precise focus and which can even let you check focus throughout the scene with the depth-of-field preview button depressed.

Composition is more precisely controlled when the tripod holds the camera in a fixed position. The more careful you are about your compositions the more you realize that it isn’t just about getting the primary subject in the frame, and that careful attention to what is (and is not!) happening around the edges of the frame is also very important. Frankly it is very difficult to pay attention to all of these things while handholding the camera, and it is all too easy to let the composition drift. Obviously, with the camera on a tripod you can fix the camera position (and focal length, if you shoot with a zoom lens) and carefully check the result and make adjustments if necessary.

Shutter speed range is much more flexible, especially in low light and at small apertures. Frankly, I sometimes wonder how people make handheld photographs in certain kinds of light. For example, when I photograph in redwood forests in interesting soft light conditions I often need to use shutter speeds of a full second or longer if I want to get any depth of field. Without a tripod the only way around this is to open up to the largest apertures (there goes the depth of field) and raise the ISO (possibly adding noise). With the tripod, in many cases I can select the best ISO for image quality, the ideal aperture for depth of filed… and almost not worry about the shutter speed.

There are other benefits as well, ranging from practical to almost silly. For example, it is usually a lot easier to change lenses when the camera is on the tripod — you no longer have to juggle two lenses and a camera while trying to avoid letting dust get into the camera body. Adjusting a tilt/shift lens is a whole lot easier when the camera is on a tripod. And sometimes the tripod turns out to help you maneuver in difficult territory, where (with care!) it can function as s sort of impromptu walking stick! And, as the photo at the top of this post demonstrates, it provides a safe place to leave the camera when you just want to sit down for a moment and enjoy your surroundings! ;-)

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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