One of the first things photographers, both professional and amateur, encounter is a desire to constantly upgrade equipment.  It’s not all the fault of the photographer, however.  Manufacturers these days just love to make brand new cameras and gear obsolete by releasing new and improved versions within a year, or even as little as months.  The common result is for photographers to feel like they must upgrade equipment and take advantage of the new features to improve their photography.  The relatively new “old” equipment then goes the way of eBay or Craigslist and the like.

First of all, this is a terrible idea.  It’s great that when a photographer is ready to upgrade, there is always new equipment available.  But there is no reason to upgrade just because there is new equipment available!  I may write more about this later, but today I want to talk about tripods.

Many people will start out with a standard, inexpensive tripod with a pan and tilt type head and locking legs.  They then quickly discover the limitations to such a tripod and start looking for one with a ball type head and independent leg movement.  There is a world of difference in the capabilities of these two different types, and for still photography the latter can be so much more flexible and easy to use.

But photographers should not get rid of that old tripod just yet.  While the new tripod can make someone head straight for eBay to auction off that old one, it would be premature for a couple of important reasons that usually don’t immediately come to mind:  Panoramic photographs and video.  Panoramic photographs are made by taking several photographs of a scene and moving the camera slightly across the horizontal for each photo.  The photos are then stitched together using software to produce a panorama.  While doing this on the old pan and tilt head tripod is a breeze, the same cannot be said of the ball head.  And for the same reason, shooting video and getting a smooth, sweeping pan motion is extremely easy on the pan and tilt head, it is extremely difficult on the ball head.  This is particularly important since almost all point and shoot digital cameras and more and more SLR cameras have video capability.

So, in the case of tripods, don’t get rid of that old equipment just yet!

Have a great weekend,

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