If you’re serious about your photography you need to use a tripod, a decent one, not all of the time, but there will be many occasions when it is so useful and makes the difference between having an amazing photo or a big blur that you can't make out.

A tripod carries many benefits to landscape photography - The most important of these is that it keeps the camera absolutely still so you’ll produce sharper images, even at ‘safe hand-holding shutter speeds’.

When you’re shooting with a small aperture at a low sensitivity setting, the shutter speed is often likely to be on the borderline or lower than a safe hand-holding speed, which makes a tripod essential. You can get a tripod on ebay and the like from just £15, so if you don't want to jump straight in to an expensive tripod this may be the way to go - to help keep it more stable - as tripods at this price tend to be quite light and often flimsy you can hang a weight - your camera bag for example off the centre of the tripod to help keep it steady whilst shooting with it - you may also find that a shutter release cable can help - as then you are not having to touch the camera or tripod at all whilst taking the photo.

Shutter release cables can also be found quite cheaply on Ebay and other similar sites - but make sure you buy the correct one for your model of camera.

Another benefit of using a tripod is that it holds the camera in the same place while you take shots at different exposures or with different focus points, so if you want you can create composite images with wide dynamic range or extensive depth of field this is the way to do it.

People often see this last point as being more of a disadvantage rather than an advantage,but a tripod often slows you down. The benefit of slowing down is that you tend to give more consideration to image composition. It makes you stop and think a bit more about what you are putting in the image and what you are cropping out of the image. If you want to shoot night time photography - stars, northern lights or fireworks - guess what - yep you will also need a tripod ;-)

For more top tips tune back in tomorrow ;-)

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