For some context, Mary and I are both cancer survivors. It’s National Random Acts of Light Day. Often it takes just one gentle word or small token to help overcome darkness. On June 13, we would like to encourage you to bring light into the darkness of cancer by surprising someone with an act of kindness.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda,” from Honda’s 1960’s motorcycle’s ad.
I think you also meet the nicest people when shooting with a tripod. Once when I was at McCabe Meadows shooting infrared images with a Pentax K-1, a women who was carrying a DSLR asked, “what’s up there?” I held up the IR filter that I was using and told her I was making an infrared picture of the tree. We had a pleasant chat and within a few seconds a cyclist passes by, stops and asking “is there a nest up there?” And so I had to explain to him what I was doing as well.
Tripods come in many shapes and materials in sizes from tiny tabletop models to heavy-duty camera stands for studio use. Because of the many variations, including colors, like my custom made red/gold Tiltall (at right,) there’s no one-size-fits-all solution, and like eating potato chips you can’t have just one. That’s why most of us end up with a collection of camera supports with different tripods used for different kind of tasks.
Here Are a Few Reasons
In this day of image stabilized lenses as well as IBIS that seems to keep adding more stops of stabilization with each new camera model, you might wonder if you even need a tripod? I think so and let me tell you why:
- Holding steady. The average person can usually handhold a camera at a shutter speed equal to the reciprocal of the focal length of the lens being used. This can change—shutter speed will need to increase—as we get older. This may also change in the near future with new cameras, like OM Systems OM-1 Mark II, that offers eight and one-half stop stabilization. but there is a big….
- Exception: Film Cameras. I can’t think of any film camera that have built-in stabilization. If you know of any, please let me know. So all of these reasons above, including the last one, goes double for film camera. I have all seven of Canon’s different A-series 35mm SLRs and while these were all technically advanced for their time—one, the AL-1, even having a rudimentary form of auto focus—none have IBIS.
- Portraits: When shooting portraits, some photographers, such as my friend Cliff and my wife Mary, prefer to have their cameras on a tripod and stand next to it so the subject looks at them instead of seeing a face blocked by a camera.
- Increase depth-of-field: When you want to work at smaller apertures for landscape images but also for shooting macro images, you’ll probably want a tripod to hold the camera steady.
- Photography with Filters: One form of infrared photography—film or digital—requires lens filters that are seemingly opaque and have filter factors approaching infinity producing extremely slow shutter speeds that even digital camera with the best anti-shake or image stabilization technologies can’t handle, at least so far.
Finally. and this may be the most important reason: Using a tripod enforces a more deliberate approach to making photographs and taking the extra time a tripod adds to the process makes you think about a photograph’s composition before banging off a few frames. This, I believe, will improve the quality of your images more than you might imagine. A tripod is also the sign of a serious photographer and people will sometimes move out of the way when they see a photographer working with a tripod. Or maybe like in my story above, they will want to stop and chat. You meet the nicest people…
If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to treat Joe to a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), click here. And if you do, many thanks.
Along with photographer Barry Staver, Joe is co-author of Better Available Light Digital Photography that’s available from Amazon for $21.50 — as I write this. Used copies start around seven bucks