Tips for using a tripod

Love them or hate them, tripods are essential for some types of photography. So, are they useful for you?

In this tripod I'll give you some tips for buying and using tripods:

• What type of head best suits your needs?
• How can you minimise the chances of your tripod falling over?
• What's a monopod?
• What options do you have if you use a smartphone?

I hope you find it useful.

It's time for another podcast...

Thank you for listening. Please remember to take a look at the website as I have a few things going on, including mini-workshops to help you with your photography: www.ge.photography

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Transcript

>> Speaker A: 0:17

Hello again. In this podcast, I thought I'd just carry on, a kind of mini series I've been doing within the podcast, which is to talk about buying, different pieces of equipment. And the one I thought I'd talk about today is tripods because some people absolutely swear by them and other people don't use them at all. So, and there are, I guess a whole group of other people. There's sort of somewhere in the middle. So I thought I'd just have a chat about them and talk about where you would perhaps need them and the kind of things you need to think about. So the obvious place you are likely to have a tripod is if you're doing studio work. So if you have any kind of studio or I you're doing still lives, still life type photography or photographing commercial objects, maybe goods, things that be on a table or standing on the floor, then a tripod is a great thing to use because it gives you a fixed point to take your photographs from, or it can give you angles so you can have the camera, right over the top of your subject. So for example, I've got, I've got a few, I've got a couple of manfrotto tripods. I'm not sponsored by Manfrotta or anything like that, but I just speak about them because they're what I use. So I have one very large tripod and one of the nice things about that is that the centre piece of it where the camera is mounted, you can pull it all the way to the top and then kind of lay it forward, which means that the top of the tripod. Now, I'm trying to explain this. You can see what I'm talking about. The top part of the tripod is now parallel to the ground and that has the camera on the end of it and the camera is pointing directly down. So using that, it does mean that I can get some quite good angles if I want to do it might be a special effect type shot if, let's say I'm photographing a glass table with some lighting underneath it and some other things around. So you can do that kind of thing. if I, I don't do product shots, but if that's your thing, it's worth thinking about. And depending on what camera you have, I'm guessing that most of them will have some form of remote, ah, control. So on my cannons, I've got a couple of cannons that you might know about. so I've got an EOS, five deciseconds and an EOS seven d mark two. So both, both cannons, they kind of drive pretty much the same. And they both have a cable connection which, connects to a laptop. And then you've got remote control. And part of that remote control system is that it does allow me to remotely operate the camera. And I can see what's on the screen. It's not actually going through the viewfinder, but it kind of drives, what will be on the little viewer on the back, the little lcd on the back of the camera. I can see that on a laptop. So that allows me to set it up. I can basically get the camera in the right sort of place and from there I can control my focus and when I'm shooting and how many shots take and all this kind of stuff. So if your photography involves shooting things which aren't moving and you've got a lot of time to set things up, then, a tripod is definitely worth thinking about because it can make your life quite, a bit easier. The other thing is, if you're photographing people, if you're doing them in a static sort of situation. So sitting on a chair with the background, all that, the sort of more traditional portrait setup. Then again, a tripod can be pretty handy because you'll know how far away, the camera is from your subject. You can do quite narrow depth fields and all this kind of stuff. anything where the subject is moving, though I don't use a tripod. I would just, you know, hand hold the camera and shoot. That's. And that's in fact, how I tend to do most of my photography. I don't use tripods very often. So that's one set of areas, one set of applications, if you like. I'm sure you can think of others where a sort of traditional tripod would be used. And the point about the tripod, it really wants to be pretty solid. And the reason for that is that you don't want any movement going into the camera from the tripod. So, the idea of having a quite a solid tripod is that the camera doesn't vibrate at all. There's no movement introduced to the camera when you hit the shutter button, however you're doing that. So that might be remotely from a computer, it might be, on a release cable, it might be on a wifi, like a Wi Fi type, release or a Bluetooth release, whatever it might be. So you want something that's pretty solid. And, you definitely don't want it falling over. So another tip, if you are using a tripod, probably outside because so you're on a slope and I'm guessing you would probably be outside to do that. Just make sure that you have one of the legs directly in front of where the camera lens is. And the reason for doing that is that if you. It's obviously we've got three legs, they're equal distances apart and you're going to have, you've got the option to have one leg basically going forward and directly underneath the line of the lens of the camera. And this is particularly important if you're using a longer lens. It's just where the centre of gravity of your camera and lens combination is. If you can imagine ah string, the little weight on it hanging from the point within your camera and lens assembly. That is the, the sort of balance point of it. If you were to balance it on your finger, it would just sit there. If you can imagine a string with a little weight on it hanging down from there. That little weight always has to be within the, the feet, where the feet are on the tripod. So with one of the legs directly out in front of the lens it gives you that stability because your centre of gravity will be within the three legs if you set it up. So that the worst situation is where you've got the two legs that kind of look side by side and the third leg behind somewhere if the camera lens is overhanging those two legs. So basically it's sticking out further than the footprint of the tripod. There's certainly a fair chance the thing will tip over and you definitely don't want that if you've got if expensive camera gear. So do bear that in mind. So just a kind of really simple tip for using. Always make sure you've got your one of the tripod legs underneath the lens essentially. If you remember that it will all work out well as far as that side of it is concerned. So that's a good thing. It's nice and solid. It'll take the weight of the camera. It's probably less likely to fall over but you know, never take that for granted. Now another thing to think about when you're using the camera is the leg extension. Extension. So the tripods that I use all have segmented legs. So what I mean by that is you sort of pull the leg out. There might be four, possibly even five segments to the leg that you can pull out. But you don't always need all of them out. So the thing to do is always pull out the thicker, sections first. So in other words, pull out the section at the top of the leg. Extend those, not the really thin one at the bottom. So only use that when you have to. And once again, that's because those thicker legs are obviously a bit more solid and it gives you a more solid platform. The thinner legs, you're more likely to get some sort of vibration going on. They're not quite as strong. So, and the point about using the tripod obviously is that one of the main reasons for using a tripod anyway is to avoid vibration, getting into the, the image while the shutter is open and you're taking a photograph. So bear in mind those two things when you're using tripods, just have the extra stability with the leg out in front. And then as you're extending the legs, use the, extend the upper sections first and leave that very thin section at the bottom to the, the absolute, sort of boss, last resort if you really need that extra height. Okay. Another thing, and this also applies if you've got a lighter tripod, a way of stabilising it is often you will find a hook or something you can hook onto at the bottom of the central part, of the tripod, that one end, at the top end, the camera will mount on it and then you've obviously that's a tube or a, some description. And at the bottom of it sometimes you'll have a hook or there'll be something somewhere where you can hang something onto that. So if you've got a lighter tripod, a way of making it more stable is to just hang some weights on the bottom of that centre section. So that will actually, what it does is it drops the centre of gravity of the whole tripod camera lens assembly. It brings it lower because you're dropping and you're putting a lot of heavy weight really down low. And that makes the whole thing much more stable and less likely to tip over if you think of it. And this is very true of the lightweight tripods, which you're more likely to use if you have to carry them a distance. those things are quite light. It means the centre of gravity of the tripod, the camera and the lens assembly is much higher. So the whole thing's much more at risk of keeling over, at some point. And it might be, you know, you might just knock it or something knocks it depends where you are and what you're doing. So that's another tip. If you've got somewhere, and a lot of these things, as I say, do have a hook of some description at the bottom. If not, maybe think about screwing, one in something you can put in, depending on what that bottom section is made of. But just somewhere where you can drop some weight. And that weight can be anything. It could be a shopping bag full of rocks or something. It doesn't really matter as long as there's a reasonable lump of weight there, a few kilos just to get everything nice and steady. And then you'll get much steadier shots as well. There'll be the chances of the whole assembly vibrating when, you operate. The shutter is pretty minimal. Okay, so they're the sort of traditional, tripods. Now I mentioned I've got a, I've got two that I use. One of them is a more solid tripod. And I use that, if I'm driving somewhere and I know I can set up, and not have to walk very far, but I prefer to use that tripod. It's got A lot of these tripods have different heads as well. So you've got the leg part, obviously. But then you will you might have kind of a universal head mount that allows you to swivel the camera in almost any direction. you might have a panning head. So that keeps the camera level, but allows you to pan to the left and to the right and keep it nice and stable. And you might also have something like, a tracking, head for astrophotography. So if you're doing Astro, you're looking at longer, exposure times there. And astro is a whole other sort of subject. It's specialist area. But if you do, if you have the shutter open for more than really 20 seconds or so. And it's quite surprising. But if you're looking at the stars and particularly if you've zoomed into anything, the chances are you're going to begin to see movement just from the motion of the earth rotating even on a very short, or relatively short shutter speed, like 20 seconds. And that is a lot, obviously, for normal photography. But for Astro, you can obviously do much longer. So the idea of the tracking head is that you put in your coordinates of where you are on the earth, on the earth's surface. And basically the head is powered and it will just keep tracking, those stars so that the. The camera stays sort of on target, as it were. So that's another one. Now those things are heavy because they have weights and all sorts of other things. And definitely, if you're going to be doing some Astro, then I would recommend you have a pretty solid tripod to begin with. And if chances are you'll have to walk somewhere. Not necessarily, but when I've done Astro, I've had to go off somewhere that's pretty remote. And that involved, I know, 2025 minutes walk from the car park where I left the car. And, But it was worth it, you know, your chance to get a decent shot and sequence of shots. Because once you get into Astra, you can start, combining shots one over the other. And, it's also done with photographs of the moon. If you've seen these amazing multicoloured, shots of the moon, they are put together from a whole series of photographs that have been taken. Now, again, to do that and to get that kind of stability, and sharpness of image, you need a tripod to pull that kind of thing off. And I guess one of the things I should have started with is when should you begin to start thinking about using a tripod? There's an old rule of thumb, and that's the, it's the inverse of the focal length. I was trying to remember what the actual law is called and I can't remember. It's probably something like that. And the idea is very simply that if you're using a 50 millimetre lens, then one 50th of a second is the slowest shutter speed you can use to hand hold that camera and get that at that shutter speed. if you're using 100 millimetre lens, it's one overdem 100, so it's 100th of a second. So hopefully that's making sense. You just take the focal length you're using and put one over the top of it. And that's the fastest shutter speed if you have a zoom lens. So I've got a 100 to 400 zoom that I use a lot for wildlife. I would apply that just to the longest focal length of the lens because the fact is the lens is going to have some weight to it. the longer it is, the harder it is to keep steady if you're hand holding, which is why you would tend to shoot at a faster shutter speed. So, in this case, the, the slowest shutter speed I would use would be one 400th of a second. Regardless of what focal length I'm actually using on that lens, whether it's 100th, 100 millimetres, 100, 2200, 300, whatever it is. I would still use one over the maximum focal, length. So one 400th of a second. So this is making some sense. So obviously, the shutter speed you're using will depend upon the lighting, what you're photographing, how fast you want to photograph it. And obviously a faster shutter speed helps you to have a sharper photograph anyway because the the shutters open for a shorter time. And any, any movement that you introduce is minimised. but if you can't do a fast shutter speed, if you've got to hold it for, you know, hundredths or even tenths of a second, or you might even go slower than that, then once you're in that area, you really need to have, a tripod. And in fact, depending on what you're photographing, even if you're shooting quite fast, if it works out, if you can use a tripod, it probably makes sense to use it, honestly, because it just reduces one source of, blurring on the image, which is just you moving while you've got the shutter button down. So even if you're shooting at a very fast shutter speed, you're even thousandths of a second. I always talk about thousandths freeze the action, hundredths. You get some movement in there. And once you get down to tenths and full seconds, then you know, that's, that's they are relatively long exposures. And you really need to be thinking of a tripod for those kind of situations. So again, hope that's helpful. what else? You can also use the tripod if you want certain effects. So one of the pictures that I've seen, pretty regularly is, a river or it can be the ocean. It doesn't matter. Any moving body of water. And what the photographer has done is just used a very long or relatively long shutter speed. So it's probably tenths of a second. It might even be a, second or two. And just depends how quickly the water's flowing. But what happens on those longer shutter speeds is that the, movement of the water kind of it all begins to cancel out. So the longer the shutter speed, obviously the, more ethereal the whole thing looks. So you don't have a sharp surface anymore. You've got a kind of blurry, surface of water, almost fog light. But the bank and things on the bank. So trees, rocks, wherever it might be, are nice and sharp. So they're kind of cool photographs. If you haven't tried that, it's, something to play around with. You might like it, you might not. It's all good. but if you understand what the different shutter speeds give you in terms of result, then obviously your knowledge of your camera gear and what you're able to produce from it, is much better. And the more complete you can make that, the better. So any long exposure photographs, anything. I guess that's sort of getting into special effects a little bit. It's certainly not a straight snapshot. You're now working to produce an image with a particular effect in it. So I guess we could call that effects photography. You, often argue with me on that one. I'm quite happy to take those. so there again though, you really want a a tripod to do that. And as I've said, I. Well, really, if you can, I always recommend taking a big old solid tripod. But if you can't, if it's not practical to get it there, then think about the tips. I've already given you for especially lighter tripod. So I've got a one kilo tripod. Again, it's a, Manfrotto. It's a little travel tripod. It has four or five. Four or five sections. It's got more leg sections than regular tripod. I think it's five. And that's simply because they needed to keep it physically small when it's all folded up so that you can get it into a backpack easily or strap it to the side of a backpack. And of course, the whole idea is to get the weight down to a minimum, which means it's relatively flimsy, as, tripods go. So that is definitely one where I always go back to using. Opening the upper segments first and only using the lower segments if I need them. And then, where I can, I'll just hang something off the bottom of the tripod just to add that weight and drop the centre of gravity. And make sure most of the weight from a centre of gravity perspective is very low down. And of course that makes the whole thing, very stable. So, again, have a think about that. again, in the wild, depends where you're going. You may be able to find rocks and heavy objects fairly easily. If not, you might have to take a few things with you if you haven't drunk it. Using, a water bottle is handy because, you know, water is quite heavy. but don't rely on a water bottle in a bag if you're going to drink it on the way up because that'll wherever you're going because that, generally won't work. So well, for you. Okay. So there's a few ideas and you know, again, have a think about the kind of photography you're doing. Just a regular tripod head, just one that allows you to move in all directions might be fine for the kind of photography you want. If you want to do panning of any type. So it might be you doing panoramas or you know, maybe movies. You want to juice to movies, then you might want to think about using a panning head. so again, once you start getting into the sort of pro, definitely in the pro tribe tripod area, you have the option of different heads. If you. If cheaper one is fine, then great. And if it's got a sort of basic head on it, that's that's fine. A sort of universal tripod head that will do the job for you. So you don't need to spend a lot of money on these things. And in fact, if you remember the tips I gave you, you can probably get good results with pretty much any tripod. Now, I'm going to mention monopods. I do have one. So a monopod basically is a one legged tripod. Another way of thinking of it. I have used them. They are useful if you have to hike a long distance and you don't want to carry a big tripod. they do form a kind of rest for the camera. And again with a big lens, if you've got a large lens, large telephoto on your camera, the chances are you're actually going to attach it to the tripod on the lens, not on the camera itself. So just be aware of that. There's usually a lens mount on bigger lenses, a, ah, tripod mount, I should say, on the bigger lenses. And you might want to use monopod. Now I've got one. I've used it a few times, but you've got more movement when you're moving around than you have with a tripod. But for me, and the way the type of photography I do and because I'm used to hand holding the camera, I just feel after a while it just gets in the way and I'd rather just handhold because I'm usually shooting animals, something like that. And I'll kind of take a chance and hand hold it, which means I probably lost more shots than I would have done if I was using the monopod. But then I might not have got the shot in the first place. So with all of these things, if you can borrow one, that is ideal, because then you can get an idea of how you get on with the gear, what kind of difference it makes to your results. So all of that is absolutely perfect. That's a kind of ideal world. If you can't, I would definitely recommend having a tripod and just get what you can afford. any shortcomings with the tripod. As I've said, chuckling a bit of weight on it normally solves a problem, because honestly, a tripod is not that complicated. A bit of gear. and then finally, the other thing I wanted to talk about, I guess, for two things I was going to talk about. One is smartphones, very briefly, because you may be doing most of your photography with a smartphone. And the thing about sort of lens wobble and all of that kind of thing introduced by holding the smartphone is less of an issue with a smartphone because it's. It's smaller, it's lighter than a DSLR or a mirrorless, and it's, There's not really much movement. There's not. You're not likely to get so much movement unless you've got the shapes or something too, much coffee, perhaps. So you can get little tripods for smartphones, and they're well worth having a look at. If you do a lot of smartphone photography, most of them are very small. They should be able to fit in your pocket and it just gives you that extra stability and might make the difference between a good photograph and a bad one. So if you do a lot of smartphone photography, particularly if it's, low light, then have a think about getting, just a small smartphone, tripod. Another thing, while I'm on the subject of smartphones, another thing we're thinking about, they cost a bit more, but they're these gimbal mounts that you can use, the smartphones, I should probably talk about those separately and using gimbal mounts, as a separate subject at some point. but they're quite. They're very good because they keep everything level and you can move around a bit and they're probably more useful if you're shooting movie. but, again, it's just another thing that's out there that you might be able to make use of. And the final thing I wanted to mention on this whole subject to tripods is it's sometimes you'll go out and you'll get in a situation where you need to do a long exposure, longer, than you can safely hand hold and you didn't bring a tripod with you. So I always look around for things I can rest the camera on. It might be, a rock, it might be some brickwork. It doesn't have to be something that I necessarily stand the camera on and step back from it. Because often I found in those situations I need to angle the camera. But what it will do is just push down on the camera. When I've got the angle right, I use DSLR, so I'm generally looking through the viewfinder and I will just push down quite hard, quite firmly on the camera and then continue to push on the shutter release. And I find that doesn't result in much movement usually, if I've got it right and it's, you know, it gets me out of that situation where I haven't got the tripod and I can still get a shot. I'll tend to do that. If I'm doing long exposures, it tends to be, urban environments. So light trails, that kind of stuff. I like to. There's a few places I've been in Sydney where I've been looking down on a roundabout at night and cars, are going round. So it's quite fun just to set a long exposure. Maybe a second or so, or even 30 seconds or 20. You know, you don't have to go to manual. You can use, or a bulb exposure. You can actually use manual at a show a slow shutter speed. And if the vehicles are moving, you can get away with a few seconds and you get a good shot. That's just something for you to experiment with depending on where you are and the light situation and all of that stuff. But often I've been able to find a wall. It's not always pointing the right way, but I'll kind of angle off it. If I've got the line of sight that I need to get the shot, that's enough. And then as I say, what I do is I get the angle where I want it. I hold everything really firmly and then just continue to press down with my shutter button to get the shot. And just hold it down until the click stops. And then. So I'm only doing the one movement down on the shutter button and I'll hear it click, you know, once the curtains close. And that's it. So that's my. I guess that's my tip. If you are in that kind of situation and you don't have a tripod with you. So that's a bit of a discourse on, tripods. I hope you found that useful. Yeah. Anything you'd like me to talk about, feel free to drop a line or comment on the video. so you can always reach me at Graham photography. And, I'm certainly happy to talk about anything, any tips that, might, help you with your photography. So that's it for now, and I'll speak to you on the next podcast. Bye for now. Just before I go, I wanted to remind you that first, of all, I have an offer running, with, my free download. So if you go onto the website and there's a link at the bottom of the description of this particular podcast, and that will take you to a link, to where you can give me your email, I will send you a PDF, which is ten simple steps to improve your photography today. So, it includes the kind of things that I talk about in the podcast. So it's all there in black and white. With some examples, you can see what's going on. And also remember, I offer, online photography courses. I do fine art. If you haven't checked out my galleries, please do. The links are again, below the description of the podcast. And don't forget to help me out. So, you're welcome to subscribe both to the podcast and you can become a member of my Patreon membership and, join me there. So in that membership, you get access, to me, and also you get advance notice of things that are coming up. I'll tell you about other things that are going on that I don't share in my Facebook group or on Instagram or anywhere else, really. So it is, just a membership where if you like what I do and you just want to be a part of it, the subscriptions are really low. It's just a cup of coffee a month. So, how much better could I be than that? So, please take a look and, I'll speak to you in the next podcast. Bye for now.