Like most photographers, I went through a phase where I was really pretty obsessed with gear. I accumulated a lot of it, and spent lots of hours researching specs, debating Canon vs. Nikon, and other mostly useless pursuits. These days I’m pretty well in the “shoot with what you have” camp, but there is one piece of gear that, in my opinion, very few photographers should be without: a tripod.
If you are new to photography (or just new to tripods), and have tried to research, you’ve probably gotten overwhelmed with options. There are so many brands on the market, each with numerous options. Do you buy legs and a head separate? Do you get 3 sections or 4? Twist locks or flip locks? Ball head or fluid head? Carbon fiber or aluminum? Arca Swiss style plate or Manfrotto? What makes the $1800 Induro better than the $20 Amazon Basics?
This isn’t intended to be any kind of comprehensive guide on how to buy a tripod, but I will say this: there are gear snobs who will tell you you have to spend the money on a Gitzo because nothing else is sturdy enough. They are wrong.
I’m shooting 90% of my work on a well-loved, years-old Promaster XC525, simply swapping out the included ball head for an inexpensive 3-way-pan head when shooting my 4x5. It’s lightweight despite being aluminum instead of carbon fiber. It’s short. It’s affordable. It packs up real small which is great for when I’m hiking. And if you subject it to various torture tests to gauge its sturdiness, it will probably not come out of those tests looking very good. But I’m a pixel peeper, and my photos don’t have camera shake, even the ones shot with slow shutter speeds and long focal lengths. And that is the absolute bottom line—if your photos don’t have camera shake, your tripod ultimately did its job.
The best bit of succinct advice I can give you is: First, know your use case. If you’re going to be shooting 30 second exposures in gale force winds with a 400mm lens whilst evading a charging rhinoceros, you’ll need to spend more money to really maximize your stability. If you’re going to be shooting general nature photography in mostly non-ridiculous conditions, you can make a lot more compromises on the rigidity of your tripod.
Second, buy in person if you can. Going to a brick & mortar store and trying out your heaviest camera and lens on a few different tripods will give you a much better idea of what is good enough for your needs, than reading a hundred reviews online. The value of testing it yourself is even higher with a tripod than something like a camera or lens, in my opinion. That said, if you’re looking for a compact, lightweight travel tripod, I can without reservation recommend the XC525 unless you’re shooting really, really heavy gear. At the time of writing this, they can be had brand new for around $170.
So here’s the big question of the day: When should you be using a tripod? Obviously there’s no single right answer here, but I can share my informed opinion and let you form your own. Street photographers, event photographers, and many sports photographers don’t need a tripod very frequently. But as a nature photographer who also shoots a fair amount of portraits, my approach with tripods is to assume I’ll be using one until I find a good reason not to. You see, tripods have a lot of benefits that people seem to forget about.
Everyone knows shooting on a tripod will let you shoot with much longer shutter speeds without getting camera shake. Used properly, that is true, and an important advantage of a tripod. But that’s only the beginning of the list of ways a tripod can help your photography.
It’s much easier to nail focus when you’re on a tripod. Shooting wide open portraits and need to lock focus on the eye? A tripod will eliminate a lot of movement between the subject and the camera. When even a few millimeters in one direction or another can make or break the shot, a tripod is invaluable. I can’t tell you how many portraits I’ve seen where the bridge of the nose is in focus instead of the eye; it’s all too easy to miss when you’re shooting handheld. Same goes for challenging landscapes where you want everything in focus, but don’t want to shoot at f/32, or when you’re doing macro work, and even your heartbeat noticeably affects the focal plane.
Shooting a panorama of any kind? It’s sometimes possible to do handheld, but if you’ve ever tried it, you’ll know how much easier it is to do right with a tripod.
If you’re bracketing exposures or focus, you’ll be able to maximize your resolution and minimize ghosting or other misalignment artifacts in post by keeping your tripod in exactly the same position between frames.
Shooting with a tripod slows you down. A big part of taking better photos is getting off of autopilot where you’re just pointing and clicking. Forcing yourself to use a tripod, even when light conditions easily allow for handheld shooting, is a great tool to work more deliberately, pay attention to composition, etc.
If you’re shooting nature, my recommendation is to plan on using a tripod unless the situation calls specifically for not having one.
That said, there are a lot of wrong ways to use a tripod. One of the most common mistakes is setting up your tripod before you have settled on a basic composition for your photo. You get to a scene, you decide to take a picture, so you plonk down your tripod, stick the camera on it, and point it at the scene. Unfortunately, you’ve just gotten into a “static” mode that has prematurely limited your composition options, and quite likely caused you to settle for a less-than-great photo.
Instead, when you see something that makes you want to take a photo, resist the urge to put your tripod down. In fact, resist the urge to look through your camera at all. Take a second and think about why you want to photograph it, and walk around a bit, stand on your toes, crouch down, look at it from different angles until you find one that seems the most effective. Then start thinking about focal lengths, looking at different compositions through your camera, etc. Finally, set up your tripod as a way to support the camera position you already decided on. With this method, you will likely find yourself shooting at lower down or higher up positions a lot more frequently than you did when the tripod setup was the first step in your photo capture process. In this way, the tripod becomes a tool to help you achieve your creative vision rather than a constraint on your creativity. Once your camera is on the tripod, you can further refine your framing, and make final decisions about focal length, exposure, filters, etc.
The second most common mistake I see is setting up a tripod unevenly. The whole point of having three legs that adjust independently is that even when the ground isn’t level, your camera can be. Take the extra 2 minutes to set the tripod up level whenever possible. Not only will it reduce the chances of having things tip over, it will provide a noticeably more sturdy base to support your camera on. Most tripods have a few different bubble levels on them, and one of them is usually dedicated specifically to making sure the legs are level with the earth. It doesn’t have to be perfect every single time, but the closer you are to level, the better your tripod can do its job properly. I often keep just the bottom section of each leg loose when setting the tripod up, and retract one or two legs as needed before tightening up.
One great invention that has gotten much more popular in the last few years is called a leveling base. It’s basically just a partial ball head with a level, which can be mounted in between your legs and your actual tripod head. Even if your legs aren’t set up precisely, you can quickly loosen the leveling base, use the bubble level to make it flat, and re-tighten. Now your head and the camera sitting on it are level, even if your legs aren’t. This can speed things up considerably when shooting in rocky, slanted, or otherwise uneven terrain, especially if you’re moving the tripod around a lot.
Finally, even with the world’s most rock solid tripod, you can easily introduce camera shake when pressing the shutter button. If you’re shooting a photo that demands to be absolutely shake-free, there are a few tools to help you achieve that consistently. The first is called mirror lockup. Most cameras with a mirror (see: SLR or DSLR) have the option to move it out of the way before making the exposure so that it doesn’t “slap” forcefully up against the camera right at the same time as your shutter is opening. This saves you some vibrations, and can make a surprising difference. Even if your camera doesn’t have mirror lockup feature, you might be able to get away with using live view, which will also moves the mirror out of the way.
The second tool is a cable release. This is either an analog or electronic cable that runs into your camera and has a button to trip the shutter. Most also have some way to lock the shutter button down for long exposures. Getting the shutter control off of the camera body itself simply allows you trigger the camera without touching it, which means you’re not adding any movement to the shot whatsoever. If you don’t have a cable release, you can get much the same result by using the camera’s self timer. Setting a timer for 10 seconds all but ensures that the vibrations you caused by pushing the shutter release will have stopped by the time the exposure actually begins.
One last thing that bears mention is monopods. If you watch football, you’ve probably seen the pro photographers running around the field with tan lenses the size and weight of a Volkswagen. Most of them use a hefty monopod to support and stabilize that weight while they’re shooting. As you might expect, a monopod is a compromise between a tripod and shooting totally handheld. It’s much lighter, smaller, and easier to move around than a tripod, but bracing your camera against the ground or wall can add tremendously to your ability to hold it still while shooting. One of these days I’ll write a full post on monopods, because there’s a bit more technique involved to get the most out of them than you might think.
Monopods are usually a lot less expensive than tripods, so if you think you might benefit from having one, I highly recommend picking one up. Moreover, a lot of tripods these days ship with a cool feature—the ability to detach one leg and use it as a monopod. My XC525 does, and it has come in handy a few times.
Have questions about tripods that I didn’t cover here? Or a bone to pick with me because you never use a tripod and your photos are perfect? Leave me a comment.