Ode to the Tripod

If someone were to ask me what is the fastest, easiest, and most effective way of instantly improving their photography, my answer would be: a tripod. In the quest to make better photographs, we often dream of owning the latest camera body or the most expensive lenses. For many of us, these remain out of reach and impractical. A quality tripod, however, can be had for less than the price of a New York City dinner for two (with drinks) and, because of that, I believe it is the first, and most important, accessory you should add to any camera system you are building.

Photographs © Todd Vorenkamp

 

 

History and Lore

 

Believe it or not, the Internet is devoid of information dedicated to the history of the use of the tripod in photography, but I surmise that its first use happened almost simultaneously with the use of the world’s first cameras. Many early cameras obscura sat on tables, but as soon as photographers started moving these cameras, they were likely mounted on a tripod.

According to Merriam-Webster, the English word “tripod” has been around since the 15th century, but humans have been using three-legged supports since long before then. A c. 5000-year-old three-legged support is currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and some Chinese examples date back almost 10,000 years.

Why a three-legged tripod instead of a four-legged quadpod? Well, if you hadn’t noticed (and you’d think more furniture makers would), anything with three points of contact will be stable—even on uneven surfaces. Yes, you can tip over a three-legged table or tricycle (recently proven by my son), but, with respect for your support’s center of gravity, the tripod is supremely stable on any surface, even uneven ones, when compared to supports with one, two, four, or more legs. Four-legged dinner tables get folded napkins and paper stuffed under one foot for balance; tripods do not.

When teaching sailing, I advise my students (and crew) to always maintain “three points of contact” with the boat—any triple combination of feet, hands, elbows, knees, and bum works.

Tripods have been a part of our culture since way before records were kept. One of the world’s most famous tripods is the Greek three-legged stool at Delphi where the Pythia sat to deliver her oracles. Why three legs? Well, you certainly don’t want an all-important prophecy delivered by a priestess distracted by an annoyingly unstable four-legged stool, nor do you want to see her with random tunic fabric jammed under one of the chair legs either.

And fun fact: There are no known animals born naturally on earth with only three legs. The animal kingdom comes in twos, fours, fives, sixes, eights, and whatever snakes have, plus some other oddballs. This fact is one reason that when science fiction aliens visit our planet, many of them have three legs, and they are angry not to have any brethren on earth.

Anatomy

I could go into all the parts and pieces of the tripod in this article, but to keep things on point, I will skip it. But don’t worry—I have you covered. If you want to dissect all the components that make up the modern photographic tripod, click here.

Instead, let’s dive into a discussion about the scenarios where you’ll want to employ a tripod when making photographs.

Long Exposures

Many photographs happen in, literally, the blink of an eye—a tiny fraction of a second. However, sometimes we must leave the camera shutter open a bit longer to allow sufficient light onto the film or camera sensor for an adequate exposure. When shutter speeds get longer there are two side effects that we can see visually:

1. Anything that moved while the shutter was open will appear blurry or ghost-like in the frame. This is called “motion blur.” Some objects might vanish entirely.

2. Any movement of the camera imparted from your not-ever-as-steady-as-you-want-them-to-be hands will render everything in the image blurry. This is called “camera shake.” For most photographic artists, camera shake is rarely, if ever, desirable in a photograph.

In order to eliminate the second side effect, we need to place the camera on a steady support. There are many options for camera supports, but the tripod is the usual suspect.

Now that we have eliminated camera shake with our tripods, we can employ long exposures creatively to get visual effects that are unique to photographs versus our normal vision. Our eyes cannot see the streaks of taillights of a passing car, or the milky smooth pour of a waterfall, nor can we see the runner’s legs moving in a blur, or the tracks of light left as the spinning earth etches star trails in the night sky. But the camera can, and that is an awesome reason to use a tripod.

Long Exposures—Daytime

When most photographers think about long exposures, they immediately equate them with nighttime photography. However, long exposures can happen in broad daylight, and certainly anytime indoors as well.

To force your camera to get a long exposure on a sunny day, you can reduce the amount of light getting into the lens by using neutral density filters and/or stopping down (making smaller) your aperture. Regardless of how you get the shutter speed to slow, you can now employ a tripod on a sunny day to steady your image and allow motion blur in the scene.

When photographing indoors, unless next to a sunlit window, you’ll notice that shutter speeds slow, since the camera requires more light to properly expose the scene. The tripod is a handy tool for helping steady the camera when this happens.

Long Exposures—Nighttime

While your tripod is certainly happy getting a suntan, nighttime is when the tripod is fully in its element. Night photography is an amazing way to explore the world with your camera, and there are even more photographic possibilities to explore in the dark when your camera is paired with a tripod.

The world looks very different at night, especially to the camera. Our night vision is mostly monochromatic due to the design of our eyes, but the camera can see color at night just as well as it can during the day. This means that nighttime, to the camera, is just as colorful as the daytime is to us.

Also, because nighttime generally requires longer exposures, we get to explore the world photographically, not for a fraction of a second, but for a length of time. Circling back to motion blur, night photography is great for visually witnessing the movement of cars, trains, boats, clouds, and the movement of our planet.

I could wax poetically about night photography all day long (I’ll be doing photos at night). Never mind—l already did in this article.

Macro

Exploring the world on a small scale is another one of photography’s gifts. Macro or close-up photography is yet another realm of the art where the tripod is almost critical to capturing successful images.

As lens magnification increases and you get closer and closer to your subject, camera shake is magnified. The evil blur is the archenemy of macro photography. How do we overcome this? Simply by using a tripod.

Macro photography presents challenges to depth of field and focusing accuracy, among other things but, by using a tripod, a lot of those challenges are minimized.

Sharpness

If you spend any time on the Internet reading about photography, you’ve come across countless mentions of “sharpness.” Capturing sharp images is one of photography’s holy grails. There are many ways to increase your image sharpness (and I shared 21 tips on getting sharper images here), but when it comes to removing camera movement, and thereby increasing sharpness, the tripod reigns supreme.

Stated succinctly, if you want the sharpest possible image from your camera and lens, use a tripod—even during a sunny day.

Process

This is where we go from the concrete to the spiritual….

Photography is a process. Regardless of whether you are using a smartphone camera to grab a snapshot of your ice cream sundae for social media, or using a large-format film camera and developing your image using alternative processes in a darkroom basement, there are steps to the process from capture to printing or viewing. Using a tripod adds a step (and sub-steps) to the process. These steps can be unwanted if you are “shooting from the hip” or just capturing a snapshot, of course, but there are benefits.

The advantage of adding a tripod to the process—regardless of the subject—is that it slows you down and forces you to give more consideration to the image you are about to create. When you fix the camera in a position in space, you find that you pay more attention to the composition and what is inside and outside the frame.

For many of us, slowing the act of photography down by adding a tripod to the process is one more way to improve the images we make. It helps physically by steadying the camera and lens, and it allows us to get long exposure photos that would be impossible without it. Yet, it also helps you mentally by forcing you to think more about the images you are capturing.

Talking Tripods

Do you have questions about tripods? How have you used your own tripod to help get successful images? Let us know in the Comments section below, and thanks for reading!