When & How To Use Your Tripod

When & How To Use Your Tripod

by William Lulow

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. If you are really looking to make SHARP images, a tripod is a necessity.

Photographing the St. Francis de Asisi adobe church in Taos, New Mexico

This image was made with the camera on a tripod, ISO 800, f/13 @1/160th of a second. I didn’t need the tripod for basic stability, but I had to bump up the ISO setting so that I could shoot with plenty of depth-of-field and a fast enough shutter speed to stop any movement due to winds and to compensate for my #25A red filter.

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-taking.

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 and then leave the controls a bit loose so they can move cameras a bit to follow some action. This is a well-known technique and often utilized even when photographing still objects.

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. So, 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, you are advised to use a cable release so that you don’t have to touch the camera to make the image. 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 and 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. 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.

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. So, the take away from this article is that whenever possible, photographers should use their tripods.