Tripod? Monopod? Gorillapod? Baffled? Read on!

Whether or not to use a tripod is one of those questions I’m asked before several of my workshops – I suspect because people would prefer not to lug a tripod around the Farne Islands for example, which is fair enough!

This article is mostly about using tripods and other forms of support like beanbags and monopods for outdoor photography and in particular wildlife and nature photography. I’ve written a separate post on maximising your chances of getting great shots hand-held. In fact a lot of the information in that article will be useful even when you’re using a tripod to further minimise camera shake and the two posts are companion articles.

But do you need a tripod to obtain sharp shots? There are several situations when some kind of support for your camera and lens are required and this support comes in a multitude of forms. Let’s look at when to use a tripod, monopod, beanbag, or any other type of support – and when to leave it at home.

So what’s a tripod for anyway?

In short: to avoid camera shake. But it’s also useful for framing a shot when the camera is to remain static (landscapes and architectural photography spring to mind) and is an essential staple in most videography to ensure shake-free footage and smooth movements during a scene.

Whenever you have a situation where the shutter speed of the camera is too slow for hand-holding, camera movement can ruin a shot by making the image soft. It’s simply down to the fact that the image moves about on the sensor as the camera exposes the image. The longer the shutter speed, the more pronounced the effect and the more stable and still the camera needs to be to avoid shaky shots. Generally, the faster the shutter speed you can use, the more camera shake is eliminated. However, a fast shutter speed is often not practical. It isn’t just limited to the effect of us as humans handling the camera either, but anything that can shake a camera, including wind.

This shot of a red grouse was taken using a bean-bag resting on my car door

Choosing a tripod

Wooden tripods are, mostly, a thing of the past and usually you’ll find aluminium or carbon fibre as the main materials used. Aluminium is heavier and cheaper than carbon fibre, but the latter is a lot lighter. When choosing a tripod, make sure it’s as stiff as possible when fully extended. Tripods are rated for the weight they can carry, so make sure you buy one that’s sturdy enough. If you put a long lens and camera on a tripod and tap on the legs lightly while looking through the viewfinder, you’ll see the image wobble if the tripod isn’t stiff enough.

Three legs, one leg, or, er six legs?!

Tripod literally means ‘three footed’ and three legs are the most common form of camera support. Leaving aside the three-legged school sports day race, which appears to have been designed to make children as unstable as possible, three feet on the ground stabilises in three dimensions on any surface, even if the ground is uneven. But what about a monopod? One foot is certainly not as stable as three, but is usually a lot lighter, more portable and simpler to use.

Most monopods are portable enough to carry with you when a tripod is out of the question. Some have fold out feet, which emerge from the bottom tube. This isn’t a substitute for a tripod, but can make a good, firm base when there’s no alternative. I’ve also seen walking poles that double up as monopods with a screw head.

What’s all this about six legs, then? Well, if you’ve ever seen anyone using a highly curious beast that resembles a metallic spider more than a camera support, they may well have been using a double tripod setup.

This is an extremely stable setup for use in very challenging situations – typically where a very long lens is being used with a teleconverter in windy conditions. The long focal length really amplifies any vibrations and the lens acts as a sail to catch the wind.

I’ve only rarely ever used this (because it means lugging two tripods around), but the idea is to fix two points on the camera setup, rather than just one. The front tripod attaches to the lens foot and the rear tripod to the camera body.

A modification to this double tripod setup is to use a monopod on the back (camera end), which means a bit less to carry round.

This shot was taken from a boat in Botswana using a tripod and Wimberley Head

Centre Columns

Not all tripods have centre columns, but those that do, have a central tube that runs through the tripod collar where the legs meet at the top. This column is used to extend the tripod height above the collar. In general, a short centre column is a good idea. It’s tempting to extend this column above the collar to increase height, but be aware that the higher you go with this single rod, the more instability it will introduce. It’s better to buy a taller tripod than to extend above the collar.

Some tripods have a reversible centre column, which allows you to turn the camera upside down and get close to the ground. Others have a completely flexible centre column (like the Gitzo Explorer top right) which means you can have the camera in pretty much any position. Great for low and awkward shots and particularly macro photography.

Head Hunting

A tripod has a screw on the top end to either attach the camera directly (in an immovable position), or more usually a tripod head with which to attach the camera whilst giving freedom of motion.

A monopod can be used without a head because you can move the whole leg around while keeping the foot on the ground. But it still doesn’t give you the freedom of motion that a head would give you, so you can add a head onto the top of the ‘pod.

Heads come in quite a variety of forms and all will be rated for a particular maximum weight. This is important because if you try to balance and move a camera and lens on top of a head that can’t cope, it’s unlikely the camera position will stay where you want it.

The heads most useful for wildlife photography are gimbal heads and fluid heads. Gimbal heads, such as the Wimberley Head are great at perfectly balancing a big lens on while allowing completely free movement. You can adjust how much movement there is in each axis to fine-tune to the situation in hand. For big lenses, this is my favourite form of shooting.

A lot of people swear by using a fluid head (sometimes called a video head) for large lenses because of the ability to move around smoothly with the handle at the back. I find them quite good, but just not as easy in the field as a gimbal head. They’re superb for video and lighter lenses.

Ball heads have a ball in a socket with a tripod screw. You can get large ball heads that can cope with big lenses, but ball heads are really better suited to smaller lenses.

Three-way geared heads are fantastic for landscape and architectural images, but hopeless with a big lens.

Quick Release

All my tripod heads and cameras have quick release plates attached so I can easily mount and unmount the camera. I’ve found it useful to buy spare plates for the cameras so I know I’ve always got one handy. I can then use other cameras and other equipment (flashes and so on) on one tripod head. Sometimes, as with the Wimberley Head, the release plate attaches to the lens foot.

This shot was taken using a bean bag from a vehicle (engine off)

Extra stability

When you’re using tripods or monopods, remember to keep the centre column short. Here are a few other tips. You can put your hand on top of the lens to dampen down vibrations. A heavy bag or other weight can be hung from the bottom of the centre column if it has a hook. This can really help with vibrations. If you’re forced to use very slow shutter speeds, you can use a remote release cable or wireless remote to disconnect yourself from the camera.

A similar effect can be achieved by using the self timer function or Exposure Delay (Nikon only I think) to create a short delay between the shutter button being pressed and the shot being taken. Lastly, if you’re using an SLR, you can use mirror lock-up to create a two stage shutter operation. The first press of the shutter button raises the mirror out of the way and the second press (best done via a remote release) actually fires the shutter. What this does is get all vibrations associated with raising the mirror out of the way before the shot is taken.

Legless

If you’re in a hide or a vehicle, tripods and monopods can actually be a nuisance. If you’re not tripping over the legs, or finding that the head plus lens doesn’t fit through the opening, you’re rueing the fixed position that doesn’t allow full movement. Enter: the beanbag.

A beanbag is arguably more stable than a tripod or monopod because it has a very wide base to put your camera or lens on and is only a few centimetres high. That’s obviously no good in outdoor situations where you have to walk around and place the camera somewhere stable (except for ground shots), but a beanbag is a godsend in a hide or car.

Beanbags come in two main flavours: single and double. The double bags are better because they’re bigger and have a natural channel to rest your camera and lens on the top where the two bags meet.

Beanbags are also flexible. They’re often filled with rice and (not surprisingly) beans, but you can fill them full of pretty much anything, including earth. The beauty when travelling by air with them is that you carry them empty and fill them when you arrive. I actually use polystyrene balls to fill mine, which weigh virtually nothing. This is great for general, year round use, although I have to top the bag up every now and again as the balls squash over time. The support isn’t quite as sturdy as with rice either, but the portability of it means that’s my filler of choice most of the year round.

I have heard of a cautionary tale of elephants taking a fancy to the food content of someone’s beanbag, but thankfully I think this is rare!

I’ll get my coat

If you haven’t got a beanbag handy, a coat or fleece will do – folded or scrunched up. They’re not as good as a beanbag, but in those situations where you’ve left yours at home and an opportunity arises, they’re a good option.

Other options

Gorillapods are a great invention: they allow you to wrap their three, flexible legs around anything: a branch or fence post for example. You can also use them for low-level shooting. I often have one in my backpack even when I’m carrying one of my usual tripods. A great example would be for squirrel photography. I’ve set a gorillapod up with a camera and wide angle lens and remotely triggered the shutter. This low position gives a great viewpoint.

Ground pods are are a good option if you need to get down really low. These can be bought (or even made out of a frying pan with a screw mount in it!) and they take a tripod head, including a gimbal head. This means you can use even a really big lens very close to the ground and still achieve nice, fluid movements. They have a flat base, which means you can move them around on the ground easily.

Studio lighting stands are a potential option – sort of. They really aren’t flexible and usually come with fixed, fold-out legs that need a very flat surface, but if you have one handy, they can be used in certain circumstances. They’re not much use outdoors, although I have used them when I’ve needed the camera in a fixed position and have already used both my tripods for wireless flashes.

Foot cords are something I’ve never seen anyone use! Indeed I’ve never tried one myself, although I know they exist. They consist of a cord with a screw to attach to the camera base and are obviously very light weight. The principle is that you put your foot on the end of the cord and pull the camera upwards until the cord is tight. In this position, the amount of vertical movement is limited and therefore it cuts down on some vibration.

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed the article. If I’ve missed anything, or you’d like me to expand on something a little more, drop me an email or leave a comment on the post and I’ll try to include your suggestion.

By the way, the answer to whether you should bring a tripod to the Farnes or leave it at home is that if you bring one, you won’t need it, but if you don’t, you’ll wish you had…

Shot using a camera on a Gorillapod and a remote release, the low angle gives an intimate perspective on this red squirrel

My carbon fibre Gitzo Explorer Mk2 G2227 with Wimberley Head supporting the 600mm f/4 lens

The Wimberley Head is a gimbal, which allows smooth and free two-axis motion for big lenses. This setup perfectly balances even the heaviest of equipment

A fairly lightweight monopod with a 300mm f/2.8 lens. Not as sturdy as a tripod, but much more portable and lightweight

A more substantial monopod with fold-out feet. Very convenient and more stable than a thinner, lighter monopod, but much heavier

Using a bag to weigh down my Manfrotto 055CXPRO4 carbon tripod. The bag damps down vibrations, especially in wind. And it was very windy at Bamburgh Castle that day!

Six legs! Two tripods: one on the lens and one on the camera. The camera bag adds vertical stability

A closer look at the double-tripod setup. Note the remote shutter release cable so I don’t even have to touch the camera

A more substantial Gitzo GT5541LS tripod for heavy work. Taken by my friend, Alan Hewitt for N-Photo magazine. In fact it’s his tripod and I wish I’d kept it! If you’re wondering about the gaffer tape, the magazine wanted to know what my 5 essential pieces of equipment are. The world would fall apart without gaffer tape

A Gorillapod in action. The legs can be put in any position, or wrapped around an object

Coat-pod!

A double beanbag on my car. And yes, it’s always this filthy. Note the cord to attach to the car. A very thoughtful addition to a beanbag. Imagine photographing a lion in the Masai Mara 10 feet from your vehicle when the beanbag drops out in your excitement. That’s why they have a safety cord

My Manfrotto 501HDV Pro fluid head, also known as a video head. It allows lovely, damped pan and tilt motion for video and can be very useful for most short to medium lenses. I prefer not to use them for long lenses

My Manfrotto 405 Pro geared three-way head. Great for landscape shots and fine adjustments. Rubbish for anything that moves

This is what the underside of a tripod head looks like with a quick-release plate. The two halves of the plate attach to each other in no time

Sharp shots are usually essential in photography. Well, ok I can think of several types of image where you’d want some sort of creative blur – to portray a sense of movement for example. But more often than not, sharpness is king.

So, do you need a tripod to obtain sharp shots? I originally started this piece on tripods and camera support but quickly realised that a separate article on tripods, monopods, beanbags and other camera support was required to do that justice..

This article is about maximising your chances of getting great, sharp shots hand-held.

Brace, brace!

A very often overlooked part of camera technique is how to hold the thing in the first place. Hold the camera to your eye as normal and put your right hand where it usually goes. The left hand is where I see a lot of people going wrong though. The best place for it is underneath the lens barrel with your elbow pointing down and into your chest / stomach. Tuck both elbows into your body and you’ve effectively braced the camera and lens against yourself, which will cut down on a lot of unnecessary vibration through the arms.

If you have the opportunity, you can also brace yourself / the camera against a tree or building or whatever’s around.

A recent trip to Costa Rica gave this position a really good workout. I took my Nikon D4 with a 300mm f/2.8 lens and that was what I shot almost everything with. I took a tripod and it came out for a few days but was quickly ditched in the rainforest because I prefer to have total freedom of movement. The D4 and 300mm was a fantastic combination: the D4’s legendary ISO performance coupled with the 300mm’s razor sharp shooting at wide apertures meant I could hand-hold in gloomy conditions.

What’s a good shutter speed to avoid camera shake?

It’s hard to recommend an exact shutter speed because some of us are more shaky than others! A tripod will disconnect us (the shaky thing) from the camera (the steady thing) so that the latter can take a sharp shot when the shutter speed would be too slow to hand-hold.

However, I must admit that I far prefer to shoot hand-held if I can get away with it as it allows so much more freedom, particularly if I’m following something fast moving like birds in flight. You can get a good idea of what will work hand-held by using a shutter speed that is at least as fast as the number of millimetres of focal length you’re using. Let me explain: if you’re using a 400mm lens, you need at least 1/400 sec to hand-hold.

That’s a nice simple rule for full frame sensors, but a lot of cameras have cropped sensors (so-called APS-C size) and this needs to be taken into account by multiplying the speed by the crop factor. Typical crop factors are 1.5x (most Nikon), 1.6x (most Canon) and there are others at 1.7x and even 2x and above. Taking Nikon’s D3300 APS-C sensor SLR as an example, our 400mm becomes 600mm (400 x 1.5). This means you’d need 1/600 sec to take a steady hand-held shot. There isn’t a 1/600 sec setting, so you’d have to set 1/800 sec.

Image Stabilisation

If your lens or camera body has image stabilisation (aka vibration reduction or optical stabilisation) built in, you can use significantly slower shutter speeds when hand-holding. The degree of stabilisation depends on the technology being employed and is usually quoted in ‘stops’. If you’re not familiar with stops in photography, for our purposes here it’s a way of expressing doubles of shutter speed where one stop equals double the speed.

So, if the amount of light available dictates a shutter speed of 1/100 sec but you have 4-stop image stabilisation, this is the equivalent of using a shutter speed 16 times faster, i.e. 1/1600 sec. It’s 16 times faster because each stop gives double the speed: 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 16.

Keeping with our example of the Nikon D3300 with a 400mm lens (effectively 600mm on a cropped sensor), you could actually just about get away with 1/50 sec if the lens has 4 stops of stabilisation. This make a massive difference.

Bear in mind though that this 1/100 might give you a sharp image of a static object, but 1/100 sec will rarely freeze the motion of any subject that is moving. So, there’s a big difference between overcoming camera shake with image stabilisation and having enough shutter speed to stop a moving object.

Image stabilisation often has more than one mode available to set. For example, there might be a ‘tripod’ setting, which optimises the stabilisation for the characteristics of tripod vibration. Some lenses have a mode that’s used while panning so that only one axis of vibration is cut out. My experience with this is that Canon’s lenses employ this second mode as an option, whereas Nikon claim their VR lenses automatically detect panning. Sometimes there’s an ‘active’ mode, which is used for very bumpy situations such as shooting from a moving vehicle.

Shooting from Vehicles

It’s not always humans that cause camera shake. Vibration from cars, boats and aircraft can ruin images. There’s a combination here of the movement of the vehicle as it travels and the engine itself causing a different frequency of vibration. The only way to get past this is trial and error, erring on the side of as fast a shutter speed as possible. I took a series of images of Victoria Falls from a helicopter and needed at least 1/1600 sec to avoid the aircraft’s motion softening the image. Image stabilisation can help of course, although I didn’t have it on the lens I was using in the helicopter. You can cut out some of the motion, by stopping the car or boat’s motor as you shoot. Although I wouldn’t recommend doing this with a helicopter!

Aperture and lens choice

Some lenses are inherently sharper than others. Prime lenses are usually better than zooms and professional lenses are sharper than consumer models. It’s also worth knowing that each lens has an optimum range of apertures where it achieves best resolution of the image, and therefore the sharpest shots. Lens characteristics vary considerably from lens to lens and there are reference sources where you can look up your own lenses.

In general though, the advice is to shoot with the lens stopped down two or three stops of aperture from the maximum aperture of the lens for optimum sharpness.

So, if you have a lens with a maximum aperture of f/4, the sharpest shots are likely to be had at around f/8 to f/11. With the exception of very expensive optics, most lenses are a bit soft at wide open aperture. That’s a shame because background blur (bokeh) is a lovely thing with a wide open lens.

Lens construction, materials and coatings are getting better all the time, but you should still be aware that always shooting wide open may not result in the best images. This is something of a kick in the teeth for anyone who needs to shoot in low light! In order to achieve the fastest shutter speed, it’s necessary to open the lens up to it widest aperture to let as much light in as possible. Such is life and this is one of the many compromises in photography.

My advice about lenses is pay as much as you can for the best you can afford. Unless you’ve been conned, an expensive lens will resolve light into sharper detail on the sensor at a wider range of apertures than a cheaper model.

An Aperture too far

Don’t assume that closing down a lens’s aperture to its minimum value (say, f/22 for example) will result in the sharpest images. Another factor comes into play when the hole that the light passes through gets tiny: diffraction. Diffraction is where the rays of light separate out as they emerge from a small aperture and end up arriving at the sensor at slightly different times as they fan out – the outer rays have further to travel. This spreads the light across more sensels (sensor pixels) than necessary and the individual light rays interfere with each other to create light and dark areas, effectively smudging the image.

I should also point out that if you shoot everything at f/22, not only will all your images have distracting backgrounds due to the large depth of field, but this small aperture won’t let much light in at all. In turn, you’ll need a slower shutter speed or higher ISO value (or both) to expose the picture properly, potentially introducing camera shake and image noise respectively.

Remember that a lens has a range of optimum apertures somewhere in the middle of its maximum and minimum apertures. This is usually between a couple of stops from maximum aperture and a couple from minimum.

Noise

You may already know that using a high ISO setting on your camera can introduce unwanted noise into the resulting image. It’s another photographic irony that increasing ISO in order to obtain faster shutter speeds and a corresponding reduction in camera shake can soften the image due to the amount of noise present. You’ll have to experiment with what you find acceptable for your camera, but you’ll find that after a certain value of ISO, the camera will record less detail and dynamic range and your pictures will need more noise reduction in post-production. And, you guessed it, noise reduction reduces sharpness.

Flash

If you’re concerned about noise in low light conditions, why not use a bit of flash? This will instantly alleviate the problem of noise and can also give you an effective shutter speed far greater than that indicated on the camera. How so? Well, in dark conditions, you set the camera’s exposure to deliberately underexpose whilst making the flash do all the work. In these conditions the flash’s duration is much shorter than the camera’s shutter is open and you’ll be able to freeze the motion of your subject at anything up to 1/38500 sec. I go into more detail on flash techniques in this post on photographing swallows.

Cleanliness is next to sharpness

It should go without saying that keeping the glass on the front and rear elements of your lenses clean gives light the most unobstructed path possible. I say it should, but I’m a bad example myself! Using a rocket blower and soft wipes as well as the occasional lens cleaning fluid is recommended. To a certain extent, shooting with a wide aperture ‘looks’ straight through a lot of dirt because the depth of field is so small and the focal point is pushed so far away from the lens. But it’s good practise to keep everything clean and anyway, as we discussed above, not all lenses can produce sharp images at maximum aperture.

The same goes for the sensor itself. I find that I can use products like the Arctic Butterfly and so on to remove a certain amount of the crap that accumulates on sensors, but every now and again I take my cameras to have their sensors professionally cleaned.

Dirty Air

The quality of the air through which you shoot can have an impact on sharpness, particularly if you’re shooting through a long lens which compresses a lot of space in front of you. It’s likely that if you’re shooting hand-held you’ll just shoot in whatever conditions you’re given, but be aware that the compression effect of long focal lengths will exacerbate the softening of an image. Haze, smog and any other atmospheric particulates can build up and have an effect.

Rapid fire

An interesting effect comes into play at slow shutter speeds and fast frame rates. If you have no option but to shoot at a slow shutter speed in low light, jack the frame rate up to its maximum, brace yourself as much as possible and take a series of exposures in quick succession. You’ll need to change the drive mode of the camera to continuous shooting.  It’s a phenomenon I find difficult to explain (because I don’t understand why it works!) but there’s a very high chance that one of the shots in the sequence will actually be sharp. Go on, give it a go.

And Breathe…

If you’re forced to use a slightly slower shutter speed than you’d like when hand-holding, pressing the shutter whilst breathing out in a long breath ensures that the movement created by breathing is controlled and steady and has less impact on shaking the camera.

The Eyes Have It

When we’re talking about sharpness, it’s rare for an entire image to be completely sharp and in focus across the whole photo. In fact, artistically speaking, you’d normally want to avoid this as it can confuse the message in the picture. Using sharpness to call a viewer’s attention to a particular part of the photograph is an important compositional tool and you should consider which part of the image needs to be sharp for this reason. The eyes in humans and wildlife alike are usually the most important part of a photograph to have sharp for two reasons: firstly because the human brain is wired to look for sharpness and will go for areas in focus before anything else; and secondly because eyes are what we look for to create a connection between us.

The lion at the top of this page is a good example of why only a small part of a photograph needs to be sharp: the eyes. Even a single eye is enough to make a personal connection to the subject of the image. The shot below of the seal’s whiskers shows when to break this rule:

Hyperfocal distance

Hyperfocal distance is one of those things that’s really only practical for static landscape type shots and not usually in hand-held photography. But you can maximise your chances of getting the best sharpness for the largest depth of field by focusing at or near the hyperfocal distance.

If you don’t have a lookup-table or smartphone app at hand to calculate this for you, a very rough guide is that about a third of the scene in front of the point of focus will be acceptably sharp and about two-thirds behind it. The actual depth of field depends on the aperture you’ve set and the focal length, but focussing about a third of the way into a scene is a good start.

Having said this, shooting hand-held is usually more about focusing on a particular subject (like an animal or person) and getting that subject sharp, rather than looking for maximal sharpness right throughout an image. I’ve just mentioned it here for completeness.

And finally…

Don’t get that hung up on sharpness! I hope the image of my youngest daughter laughing shows that sharpness isn’t always important to create an engaging image: