Pixiq

Sometimes the most basic decision when you’re about to set out for a shoot affects everything you do. Of course, how you load your shoulder bag at any time is important, but when it comes to night-time (or indeed any low-light situation), there’s a very simple, major choice. Are you going to hand-hold, or go with a tripod? You can't easily do both.

On the face of it this may sound a little trivial, but it has far-reaching consequences. The two paths, hand-held or tripod shooting, are each suited to different subjects and conditions, and they are widely divergent in style. And, unless you’re fortunate enough to have an assistant or a willing companion to carry things, what you set out with on an evening’s stroll through the city (or elsewhere) will determine the kind of photography you can do.

Low-light and night-time photography is one area in which process dominates. That means all the various limits and difficulties need to be thought about before you start shooting. In practical terms, it’s about pushing technical and mechanical limits as far as you can, and this in turn means that there are two competing ways of approaching it. In one you try and retain the freedom of using a camera in much the same way as you would under normal light. The alternative is to abandon freedom in favour of a full choice of technical settings — sharp, clean images without noise and at any aperture setting and with no limit to the exposure time (except, of course, for short exposures). And it’s not easy to switch from one to the other in mid-shoot.

There are good arguments for both hand-held and for using a tripod, and which to choose depends on the subject, your preferred style, the results you are looking for and the quality you absolutely need. The key factor for most photographers is the optimum shutter speed for subject movement. If the subject is active, for instance people in motion, a tripod is no help in freezing the movement. Some kinds of movement may well be acceptable, even desirable, such as the streaked trails of vehicle lights on a highway, but if you need a sharp capture, then the threshold shutter speed for this determines everything. Basically, the rule is: if people, then hand-held.

Hand-held

The obvious advantages are freedom and mobility, and the chance to shoot unobserved, without drawing attention to the camera as is inevitable with a tripod. You can strip down the amount of equipment drastically; one camera, one or two lenses, maybe a flash unit if the camera does not have one built in, and very little else. 

The disadvantages are in camera handling and image quality. As you can never enjoy the luxury of fast shutter speeds, holding still is always an issue, and often calls for over-shooting to lessen the risk of frames lost to camera shake. One thing that low-light photographers quickly get used to when shooting without rock-steady support is that there is always a failure rate. Of x number of frames shot, y will be flawed because of blur of one kind or another. The aim is to bring the number y down as much as possible, and reduce the proportion of failures. Indeed, if every frame were technically perfect, this would be a sign that you were not pushing the limits as hard as you could.

A fast lens, with a maximum aperture wider then ƒ2, is a distinct advantage, though costly. Image quality centres on noise, because the key strategy is setting the appropriate ISO. High sensitivity means high noise levels, and while there are ways of dealing with this in post, it reduces quality. This completely depends on how the pictures are going to be used, in particular the size. A tip: make yourself familiar with just how bad different noise levels look when reproduced at particular scales. 

Locked-down

Abandoning uncertainty in favour of near-guaranteed sharp, noise-free images is the alternative. Tripod and head choice is a major subject in its own right, and here I’m concentrating simply on the difference in shooting style between two contrasting methods, but a light carbon-fiber model with a good, compact ball-head and quick-release plate fits the bill well.The main point is that if you’ve chosen to go the tripod route, hand-held shooting is almost impractical. Like a dog on a leash, you’re stuck with it as long as you’re out. While the process of shooting is certainly more reliable than hand-held, it demands its own particular technical proficiency. In place of the physical attention that hand-held photography demands, there is care in tripod management and protection from vibration.

The advantages go further than sharper and less noisy images from long exposures and smaller apertures. Shooting a series of exposures of the same scene allows you to cope better with high dynamic range. And many night-time street scenes and lit interiors have a distinctly high dynamic range. The reason is two-fold: pooling of light, and because light sources are often in view. With a moderately static scene, like the city view here, shooting a sequence of several exposures spaced around 2 ƒ-stops apart let’s you capture most of the useful range. Of course, this is standard HDR technique — but you don’t have to use HDR tonemapping to process the sequence. If, like me, you dislike the weird effects of HDR, a simple exposure blend, like Photomatix’ Exposure Fusion, does perfectly well.

In summary: Pros and Cons