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 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 use a tripod 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 you haven’t accepted the extra trouble and when you haven’t developed instincts that make tripod use a lot more automatic. I’ll readily admit to being less than thrilled on about the 50th time that I must remove my tripod from the car or pack, 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 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.)

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 camera motion and vibration. This is especially important when doing types 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.

High resolution cameras can capture images that may be reproduced at much larger sizes, and at those sizes the effects of minor camera stability issues become more visible. If you want to take advantage of such cameras’ potential for higher image resolution, the stability that comes with tripod use can be critical.

Continue reading About Tripods (Morning Musings 11/4/14) →