Photography Tips - The Tripod

This is the first in a series of blog entries that I am writing about photography. While I am hardly an expert, I've learned a lot over the past eighteen months and you might find some of the tips useful.

You can take great vacation photographs without owning an expensive camera or a bagful of premium lenses. One of the keys to taking memorable photographs of landscapes, landmarks or other sites is to use a tripod. Whatever you shoot with, a tripod can be the difference between a picture you mount on the wall and a beautifully composed, but blurry picture.

The tripod’s purpose is to keep your camera still. No matter how steady a photographer’s hands, there is always some slight movement. The longer the shutter is open when taking the picture, the more likely that movement will cause the photo to look blurry. Major camera companies like Canon, Nikon and Sony have implemented technology in their cameras or lenses to help reduce blurriness caused by camera movement. While these technologies do a wonderful job, they cannot eliminate camera movement as well as an inexpensive tripod.
A tripod is particularly useful for landscape and landmark photography for a few reasons. First, when you take landscape photography, you will usually want to use a small aperture. The benefit of using a smaller aperture is that more of the scene will be in focus. The disadvantage is that the smaller the aperture, the smaller the hole that lets the light into the sensor. Since the hole is smaller, the shutter will need to be open longer to allow in the proper amount of light. The longer the shutter is open, the more risk there is that you will have camera shake if you try to hand hold the camera.

Another reason that a tripod is so useful for landscape and landmark photography is that usually the best time to take those shots is at sunrise or sunset. Sunrise and sunset provide a warm light that is often referred to as the golden light. A lot of professionals will only take these kinds of photographs at and around sunrise and sunset. While the sunrise and sunset can provide a warm light that will improve your photography many times over, shooting at these times has a price beyond the loss of sleep and being late for dinner. It’s simply not as bright as in the middle of the afternoon. Since there is less light when the camera opens the shutter, it needs to keep it open longer in order to get the correct exposure.

So how long is that shutter going to be open? When I took my pictures at sunset in Sukhothai, the exposure time ranged from four-tenths of a second to twenty-five seconds or more. Even with anti-shake technology, a person cannot hold a camera perfectly still for almost half a second, much less for nearly half a minute.

The only way that you could hand hold in those situations is to use a larger aperture, resulting in less of the image being in focus, and to crank up the ISO on the image. Increasing the ISO makes the sensor more sensitive to light, which decreases the shutter time. The trade off for increasing the ISO is more noise in your picture.

In Sukhothai, I saw alot of people taking pictures at sunrise hand holding their cameras. My guess is that when they got home, they had either images that were somewhat blurry or that had a lot of noise. I know that in either case, I would be disappointed.

Tripods come in a variety of costs. Like most things, you get what you pay for. You can buy an inexpensive aluminum one for under $20. The downside is that these are often not as sturdy, and more subject to vibration. The high end carbon-fiber tripods are light and eliminate almost all vibration, but can run you hundreds of dollars, and that does not include the tripod head to which you attach your camera. My tripod is aluminum, but is more sturdy and heavier than its cheaper brethren. It cost me about $100. I tried to use a cheaper one when I was back in the U.S. this summer, but I think my camera and lens were a little too heavy for it.

So what kind of tripod is right for you? Serious photographers who are going to be lugging the tripod around a lot and want to try to eliminate any vibrations will probably be looking at the carbon-fiber variety of tripods. If your goal is to make your vacation pictures look a little nicer, then I would consider one of the inexpensive aluminum tripods. Some of them can collapse so that they are less than a foot long. This makes them easier to carry. The easier it is to carry, the less likely you are to leave it back in the hotel room. The best tripod in the world will not help your pictures at all if it is lying folded on your bed.
The tripod has another benefit in that it lets you “get into” the pictures. I mean, you can do like a lot of people and hold your camera at arm’s length and get your face in the shot, but it’s really hard to compose a nice shot when you are not looking through the viewer or at the LCD.

The tripod really is a great way to improve your photographs. It won’t suddenly make you a master at composition or transform a boring screen into a magnificent one, but it will hold your camera still so that you can get a sharp photo. I look at it this way. If I travel to some beautiful place to which I might never return, I would hate to return home and find that the picture that I took that looked perfect in the small LCD screen is blurry when blown up to four by six or larger.