There comes the point when you’ve got to accept that specific tools are necessary and you cannot do without them. I am a photographer. I am referring to tools that are related to photography. But the one particular tool I have in mind as I write this is the tripod. When I started photography, I felt that a tripod was overrated and that I would never need one. I felt my hands were perfectly steady, and I could shoot even landscape photography without needing a tripod. How wrong I was!
So here are my five reasons I need a tripod, specifically for shooting landscape photography.
Increased stability
The first reason is the one I had initially avoided using a tripod. A tripod adds a lot of stability to your whole set-up and improves the sharpness of your images in ways you can’t fathom unless you start using it. No matter how steady your hands are, you must understand that your body is in constant motion, even when sleeping. As you breathe in and out and your heart beats, your body makes tiny movements that become exaggerated via the camera lens. With a tripod, all of these can be overcome. This is particularly important when shooting fine art, high-resolution, and macro photography.
Sharper images at a slower shutter speed
A tripod lets you slow down your shutter speed and capture light over an extended period. This sounds crazy tech, but it’s not. This is a simple aspect. Your camera has a mechanism that’s known as a shutter curtain. It opens to let light in and make an exposure before closing and resetting for the next shot. When you slow down the shutter speed, the time for which the shutter curtain(s) remain open increases.
Two things happen when the shutter curtain remains open for extended periods. First, a lot of light enters the camera, and second, the camera has enough time to register micro-movements. When holding a camera for an extended period, say 1 second or more, your hands will invariably move. Even if the movement affects by one pixel, your images will register blur. With a tripod, this is never an issue.
Consistency for certain types of shots (HDR and time-lapses)
You must ensure that your camera does not move between each frame when shooting certain precision-type shots, such as HDR and time-lapses. This is because when you’re merging the frames in post-processing or making a time-lapse video, there would be visual jerks if the frames are not perfectly lined up. With a tripod, this can be avoided.
