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GADGET BAG |
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Sharpness Is Easy
Tripods are indispensable, and new, exotic materials and construction make them better, lighter and stronger than ever
By Robert Hawk
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: If you’re looking to improve your photography, the single most useful tool you can use is a tripod. As photo gear goes, tripods fall somewhere between a sandbag and lens-cleaning tissue on the “cool equipment” scale. Compared to exotic optics, advanced filters and new übertech SLRs, what’s less sexy than three sticks connected to a hinged plate? And yet the tripod remains the device that’s most likely to have an immediate, positive impact on your imagery.
Why do tripods have that kind of power? First, there’s the obvious: A tripod will steady your camera and enable you to get a much sharper photograph than you can get by handholding. Even if you think of yourself as being steady of hand, you can’t beat the stability of a solidly grounded tripod.
And that goes for any shutter speed you select. We all know the minimum-handholding rule (the reciprocal of your focal length becomes the minimum shutter speed you can handhold, e.g., with a 300mm lens you need a shutter speed of 1/300 sec. or faster), but that rule is really more of a guideline and only applies to bare-minimum image quality. You’d still get a sharper photograph with a 300mm lens if you mounted the camera on a tripod and shot at 1/300 sec. than you would if you handheld at that same speed. The minimum-handholding rule is not a tripod-equivalent rule.
The second reason a tripod improves your images is it forces you to slow down. One of the best features of an SLR camera is its compact design. You can move and shoot with lightning speed, composing on the fly, and if you have an 8 GB memory card, you almost never have to stop to change cards or download images. Conversely, those advantages can also hinder your photography. Slowing down to look through the viewfinder forces you to be a good editor. If you have to set up a tripod, mount your camera and then adjust the camera and tripod to finesse your composition, you’ll tend to look carefully at the shot. Slowing down can be a good thing.
So if all of the above is true, why do so few of us actually use tripods? It’s like dental floss—we know we should use it, but somehow it just doesn’t happen. The moment we realize that we should have pulled out the sticks is usually when we’re critiquing the images.
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