Forget about low light, camera shake, self portraiture and the like - there is one very good reason for carrying a tripod and that is HDR photography. Much touring photography is about recording the vistas the tourist passes through, and HDR photography produces stunning landscapes. HDR photography requires up to 5 images and a tripod really is the best way to ensure they overlay accurately.

Look at some of these landscapes.

We went to an exhibition last night that was an essay for the Tall Ships festival that was held in Hobart just before we arrived back in the state. There were two shots that really grabbed me, and two that almost made the grade.

It's personal taste, I know, but if you are going to try for a neat light effect on a docked at night, do it at 2 or 3am in the morning when the place is deserted, not when there are a tens of people about creating ghosts that distract from the main subject. The two that missed in my estimation were like that.

I'll just also go back to my comment earlier about photographs being a record. I am applying for a tour guiding job at the moment, and one of the things I have done is sent the company a link to Machka's flickr account, essentially to validate my claims about travel. As it transpires, the principal of the business has a done a lot of bicycle touring herself. But a part of the job requires getting involved with the participants -- hiking, swimming and so on. I can show I have scope to do all those things, too.

So don't forget to include pictures of yourself doing stuff. It's then that a tripod can really come in handy, especially if you want to set up shots of you actually riding your bike.

Very cool. I don't think most of us will be tour guides.

Stunningly fake, I'd say. Most HDR-enhanced photos that I've seen just scream "I USED HDR!!!" to me. This is one of those tools that most people don't seem to be able to use with any subtlety...

I remember talking to a grade school art teacher many years ago....

Do you know the difference between 1st grade art and 5th grade art?
The 5th graders know when to stop.

HDR is an incredible tool, but too many people don't know when to stop.

The "problem" is that many can't resist the urge to go nuts on the tone mapping and turn the scene into some ethereal otherworldly image. Done with restraint, it can bring out highlights in one section of a image that might otherwise have blown out detail.

And it's nothing new. Ansel Adams was a master at the analog version of tone mapping, known as dodging and burning, which was done when making prints from a negative. He also wrote the definitive book on the subject, albeit primarily for b/w prints: The Print (Ansel Adams) | Amazon.com

To a degree, much of this can be accomplished in the camera itself with a graduated neutral density filter, which lets you expose the sky differently than the ground, but assumes a flat horizon and doesn't lend itself particularly well to rugged mountain landscapes or skylines (for example).

Here's a picture from Wikipedia's HDR page that IMO shows an example of lost contrast and detail in three individual exposures (along the bottom) restored via HDR without going too terribly far overboard (click image for full sized picture):



And, yes, you need a tripod, and probably a camera with a built-in exposure bracketing function.

FWIW, my other use for a good, solid tripod and ballhead would be panoramas. Obviously, YMMV.

Me too.

The top image has clearly been altered using HDR. Not as bad as some, but it looks decidedly unnatural to my eyes... The middle photo on the bottom row looks much more natural to me.

To my eye it is a quite pleasing image, but I do think it is a bit overdone. I suspect the exposure bracketing is a little broad. But there are plenty of photoshopped images out there that are equally overdone.