A case for old school
A lot has changed in photography since I started my affair with it some 30 odd years ago. Digital recording of your images being one of if not the biggest technological jump.
I’ve run into several photographers who having tried it and went back to just shooting with film equipment. I don’t try to change their minds, for I know there is a qualitative difference between digital and analog, and as photography is an art form, who among us can ever tell someone else which art form they should like better?
For me I have been a full digital convert no two ways about it. Yes there are definitely things about shooting with film camera’s that I will always love that digital hasn’t come close to replicating ( like the lack of banding in your lovely skies when shooting at dawn and dusk. Banding is the digitizing of your color transitions and can never happen when shooting anolog, only when you shoot digitally, and can many times be impossible to get rid of). But the advances and advantages of digital to me still far outweigh the losses I’ve incurred.
The superior editing latitude of digital allows me to do things I never could with slide film. And if something uncomplimentary to the scene is in the shot, many times I can remove it without you ever knowing it was there. Try doing that with film. I can also correct for uneven horizons, and converging verticals (buildings that look like they are falling backwards when you tilt your camera up to include the whole building), in post processing where with slide or film it was either difficult or impossible to correct anything. What you shot is what you got. So your technique had to be on point. For that reason I found slide film was a fantastic format to use to teach me the disciplines that I use in my digital photography, but for me digital is the way to go now.
Another great digital improvement is light sensitivity. Digital far out performs film in that respect too. In fact digital cameras are so good at high ISO’s that I can record high detail quality shots of images in incredibly low light situations. This also allows me to forgo using a tripod to capture a scene, as I can bump up the ISO to something like ISO 800 and get a shutter speed high enough to freeze any camera shake especially with the digital stabilization built into many of today's digital lenses, and get an image that looks like I shot it on Kodachrome 64. Such a high light sensitivity setting like that on an analog medium like slide film would result in a lousy looking image on a 35mm camera.
Now if I’m using my new cropped sensor Nikon and I’m out at the lake searching for deer foraging in the brush, I can ditch my tripod altogether and stalk them on foot through tangled bushes and get great shots of them that would be impossible if I needed to use a tripod, and in fact when I’m shooting with my new D500 now I rarely ever have it attached to that three legged device.
Even when I’m shooting with my new full frame Nikon that I shoot scenics, macros, and garden shots with, I often shoot hand held, as there are many times where tripods are not practical or out rightly forbidden.
So with such great new tripod freeing technology in my arsenal that I use all the time you might ask if I even still own one now. Or have I sold my tripods so I could use the cash buy more useful equipment that is more in step with the times. The answer surprising to some is yes, in fact I still own three. And each tripod I purchased for specific situations that I run into a lot. Many of which don't revolve around cases where the camera's too heavy to hold for extended periods.
You see even in a photographic age where technology has allowed us to be spontaneous and flexible and able to capture images in situations that heretofore were nigh impossible, and made the tripod for smaller camera’s like the DSLR seem as critical to life as your appendix, there is still a value to this old school piece of equipment, and not just for things like panoramas.
There will always be scenes that you come across that are made up primarily of static components that aren’t going anywhere, that you can take your sweet time with. Some of these scenes to the casual observer, and even a lesser skilled photographer may go unnoticed and so unphotographed. Sometimes it's because the beauty in the scene is being obscured by other elements which you must tone down or eliminate altogether. Maybe the beauty of the scene is subtle and needs to be viewed at an angle that make it stand out.
In such a scene often little annoying or downright ugly objects can go unnoticed when quickly shooting it live, but then stick out like a sore thumb once you look at the scene in Photoshop. Good luck if the background behind the offending object makes the cloning or lasso tool impossible to use without leaving a bizarre footprint almost as bad as the object it replaced.
And always in these type of scenes you need to carefully choose not only the main subject in the foreground but which things you want in the background, where you want them to be in relationship to the main subject and just how in or out of focus you want those background objects to be. And still many more things too long to list that you need to carefully take into account before you click your shutter.
For many such scenes as these, the best way to tackle them is with a slow careful thoughtful approach. For me there is no better way to slow myself down and look at every square centimeter of my image than if I put my camera on a tripod and free my hands to think.
The hand and the mind work together (watch how we all move our our hands when we talk). For me I think best when my hands are freed from holding my camera, and the ever present command my brain is telling my hands to not let $4000 worth of equipment slip out of my grip and crash down at my feet. Or slam into my ribs or hip if I'm wearing one of my various camera straps.
Freed by my tripod my mind is now free to observe the scene in front of me, not just the way that it appears to the naked eye before me, but how I want it to appear in my final image, often - through the magic science of lens optics, that is a way that our eyes are incapable of seeing it live. And with digital camera’s ability to instantly review your shot (another advantage of digital over film, even a Polaroid back would make you wait a few minutes before you could view your scene), you can look and check if there was anything you missed, anything you’d like to add, subtract or shift around by moving your camera to a different spot.
While I can do all this hand held, mental fatigue is sure to set in on me sooner or later when doing so, especially if the camera and lens combo is a heavy one, and the quality of my work may suffer along with it. But with this old time, old school piece of support equipment holding my camera for me, I find at times rather than cramping my creativity, it unleashes it.
