One of the most fundamental and useful pieces of gear any photographer or videographer can own is a tripod. These two excellent videos will give you numerous tips to ensure that you are getting the most out of your tripod.
Coming to you from Kai W and Lok Cheung (that is right, the old team), these two great videos will give you lots of great tips on how to use a tripod. You can watch Kai's video above and Lok's video below.
On the topic of tripods, they are one piece of gear I personally think you should never skimp on. First, cheap tripods tend to not be all that stable, and you can quickly negate their positive effects if they are not solid and rigidly built. Second, I personally would feel quite nervous about putting several thousand dollars of gear on a cheap support. When I was new to photography, I bought a very cheap tripod from a department store (I'm pretty sure it was $18, if memory serves), and after a very close call in a river, I quickly realized the importance of sturdy and rigid support. Check out both of the videos above for lots of helpful tips.
back in the day; it was said the first item to buy after the SLR camera was a good tripod . And although that was long before image stabilisation , I feel it's still good advice and the second good advice is "use the bloody thing" . That is something I don't do enough even though I know I will likely have less images on the card (we all take TOO MANY photos) but have far better photos on the computer screen . And that has very little to do with "sharper" photos .
IMO; it's all to do with slowing down --- being able to move away from the camera to look for different options --- being more observant of the subject , and light --- noticing the little things out of place --- considering the editing to make the final picture ------ and taking just one photo or a bracket of photos. .
Not sure I would have recorded this subject without my "rubix cube" of tripods .
A nod to the 'pod.
In the last few days it seems as if peak bought up all the blogs/shills because everyone is doing a peak pod review. Kind of like a few months ago when the only topic was the Fuji x100v.
Oops, there goes another split infinitive in the title Alex. ;-)
If a tripod is cheap enough to jeopardize your gear, it's too cheap. But so many people think that any tripod under $400 is cheap. I use a $120 tripod by a knockoff brand. It's basically a clone of the MeFoto roadtrip. It's plenty stable enough even for long telephoto shots with my gear, and I even use it for 4x5 work (granted, with an Intrepid which is notoriously lightweight).
"Cheap" means different things to different people.