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Photographic Gear – Tripods

Five things to look for in a good tripod.

We’ve been taking a tour through my camera bag and so far, we’ve covered the bag itself, camera bodies, lenses, filters and miscellaneous. If you haven’t seen one or more of these articles, here are the links.

Photographic Gear – A Tour of a Photographer’s Camera Bag

Photographic Gear – the Camera Body

Photographic Gear – Lenses

Photographic Gear – Filters

Photographic Gear – Miscellaneous

This article completes the tour, but we now move outside the camera bag to the bag’s exterior where the tripod is often mounted.tripod

Most good camera bags have provisions for mounting your tripod. This is extremely handy when you have longer distances to travel or you need to work your way through the brush to get to where you want to shoot. And any discussion of photographic gear is incomplete without including the tripod, at least for us landscape photographers.

Sharp Images

When we talked about camera bodies and lenses, we talked about technology that reduces or eliminates blur caused by slight camera movements when shooting hand-held. It goes by various names depending on the manufacturer but the goal is always the same – sharper images.

The tripod has always been the mainstay of sharp images for the landscape photographer. A camera mounted on a sturdy tripod will not move when the shutter fires although that statement is not absolute. There are circumstances when even on a tripod images can be blurry due to camera motion.

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Getting Great Landscape Photographs – Tripods

How I came to own the tripod I now use.

Like many of us I was passionate about photography when I was in college and for a while afterwards.  Then the effort seriously building a career started consuming all my time and photography got pushed aside.  But I bought a new camera when my daughter was born and that kick started my return to photography.  It wasn’t long after that that I started getting back into landscape photography and I went out to purchase a tripod.  I didn’t have a lot to spend so I picked up one in the $125 range and said ‘Ouch’ when I put it on my credit card.  It was something like this one.

tripod-under-200

Every time I wanted to use it I had to screw the camera on to the camera mount.  It wasn’t very tall so I find myself extending the center post all the time and still I had to hunch over to look through the viewfinder.  But it was light weight and I thought all the handles and nobs used to aim and adjust your camera were pretty cool, even if they were a bit awkward.

I got a lot of use out of it – until I set it down at Mt Rushmore, forgot it, and walked off.  When I discovered my mistake we want back to check with the rangers to see if anyone had turned it in.  Of course it was gone.  So we rushed into Rapid City, South Dakota to find a camera store and buy another one for the rest of the trip.  I got the same kind.

It took awhile but it eventually became apparent that a $125 tripod just wasn’t going to do the trick.  It wasn’t very solid and was pretty awkward to use.  So I started reading up on them.  I came across the blog article that explained how you can save $2000 on a tripod by spending $2000 on your first tripod.  That still seemed like a lot of money.  But if that is what it was going to take, ….  So, working from the bottom up I started putting together what I needed.

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