Tripods 1

      For all the years that I used film SLR’s and the early years of digital SLR’s I religiously used a tripod. The bulkiness of SLR’s and the slapping mirror I wouldn’t have thought about doing things any differently. I also used a wired remote to avoid shake.

     In 2013 I bought my first ILC mirrorless camera. It was so much smaller and lighter, I stopped using a tripod and shot handheld most of the time. For the next two years, I didn’t use a tripod unless I was shooting a scene that required me to blur the water in the image.

     In early 2016 I had a major problem with several of my drives. While I was working on retrieving the images, I realized just how noisy some of the images were. Most of the noise was coming from bracketing 3 images and merging them together, but most of the images that were noisy were ones that had been handheld.

     Moral of the story, I use a tripod when I need the latitude to keep the image as noise free as possible.