Use Your Tripod

 Use Your Tripod

by William Lulow

This was an article I published last year and it was called “THE BENEFITS OF USING YOUR TRIPOD!”. Today I’m just using it in the imperative tense!

I just stumbled upon a YouTube video with a photographer talking about his tripod and how to use it “properly.” That word kind of took me aback a bit, because the notion of using it properly seemed a bit strange. If you decide to use your tripod at all, most people probably wouldn’t know that there is an “improper” way to use it. You just use it to make your camera more steady. Right? Well, there is more to it than that.

First: the very idea of using a tripod inherently means that you plan to be much more careful about what your photographs will be. You intend to be much more deliberate about your picture-making. This also means that you plan to take much more time setting up your shots, which also means you will think about the whole process a lot more.

Second: Your attitude toward taking your pictures is more deliberate because setting up a tripod for your camera takes time. You wouldn’t do this if you were intent on shooting quickly in order to capture some action, for example. Although many sports photographers who want to do just that, often set their tripods or monopods up way in advance of what they are going to shoot because they know that they need the stability it provides for a really clean, clear shot.

Third: A tripod opens up a few different types of shooting styles. One obvious one is that it allows you to shoot with much slower shutter speeds because the camera is supported and won’t move when the exposure is made. The slower shutter speed will then allow you to stop your lens aperture down much more, allowing for a much greater depth-of-field. You can make some really neat long exposures like the one below:

This image was made by setting up my large tripod and placing my 4×5″ view camera on it. I arrived just before the sun went down and the lights came on in the buildings, which is why the sky is not black. I made an initial exposure, then after the sun went down and the lights came on, I made another exposure on the same film (a double exposure), at a very slow shutter speed, I believe it was about 10 seconds or so at f/22 with 100 speed film (today it would be ISO 100). That accounts for the white and red streaks made by the moving cars.

Note: when making any long exposures, it is advisable to use a cable release so that you don’t have to touch the camera to trip the shutter. Some studio shooters actually use their cameras tethered to a laptop computer and fire the shutter from the computer. Here is one for my Canon cameras:

Fourth: Using a tripod, you have made the decision to work more slowly and carefully, as I mentioned. This will allow you to compose your images more exactly, paying more attention to vertical and horizontal lines.

Many photographers don’t use tripods, but to make an image like this you absolutely need one. You can’t do this without one. It allows the photographer to use smaller apertures to render images sharper with greater depth-of-field. Here’s another shot that required a tripod:

In this image, which was made as the sun was coming up, there was very little light. I had to capture the lights that were on as well as the sky. This also required a slow shutter speed because I wanted to shoot at a very small lens opening in order to maintain focus over quite a distance. And here is another:

Note the extreme depth-of-field in this image. It is sharp from the very front to the very back. Exposure was f/32 at 15 seconds, ISO 100. Here is one more example:

So, in this shot, I needed to be precise about the vertical lines of the building, plus I was setting up for another evening shot where the lighting would be minimal and therefore required a longer exposure. Here was the setup for this image:

This is my large tripod, the one I used to use for my view cameras. It extends to a bit over 6-feet and can handle a camera that weighs more than ten pounds.

When I am taking a trip and want to take a tripod with me, the regular tripod is really too big and won’t fit in my camera bag so I got a portable one that collapses down to 15 inches and extends to about five feet. It can take the weight of a normal DSLR with no problem.

I tested this little guy out with my Canon 90D and a 135mm f/2 lens attached and it was steady as a rock. I am now using this one in the normal course of shooting in the studio as well, and for travel it is perfect, compact and sturdy enough for what I might encounter on the trail.

So one of the main uses of a tripod in the days of digital images is to enable the photographer to shoot with smaller apertures and longer exposure times. This opens up a whole world of images that can be captured that otherwise would not work. For instance, the image below was made at dusk and there were people milling about and cars passing by regularly. You can make everything “disappear” by using an extremely slow shutter speed, but there is often too much ambient light to do this effectively. The solution is to put your camera on a tripod and then put a series of neutral density (ND) filters over the lens to cut down the light. The exposure here was 45 seconds @ f/11 with a 4 stop ND filter pack over the lens and with the aid of a cable release so that I didn’t have to touch the camera. You can actually see the branch in the upper left that was blurred by a bit of wind:

So, the take away from this article is that whenever possible, photographers should use their tripods. I use it whenever I possibly can, even for shots where I am making a normal exposure and even most of the time I am shooting in the studio.