Keep yourself hydrated, and your camera steady

    The tripod is usually considered the ultimate standard for keeping your camera steady.

    But there is a way to make it an even more rock-solid way to keep your camera from shaking: Hang extra weight from it.

    Many of the newer tripods have a hook on the bottom of the center column. It will either be permanently out or one that retracts inside the column when not in use, but the purpose is the same: To provide extra stability to the tripod.

     In an ideal situation — read in a studio or indoors with few people around — a tripod's three legs provide significant stability for a camera. But outside, there's wind and other things that can cause shaking or movement.

    Plus, if you have to raise the center column, that adds a measure of instability as you are putting a large amount of weight up high on a narrow column.

    The hook at the bottom fixes that, to a major degree.

    One of the things a weight at the bottom does is lowers the tripod's center of gravity. Instead of being top-heavy with a camera and lens at the top, there's more weight lower on the tripod, making it more stable.

    The extra weight also pulls down on the legs, further stabilizing the legs.

    Some photographers will hang sand bags from the hook to provide that stability, others use it for their camera bags.

    I was going to shoot fireworks on the Fourth of July, and with a slight wind I thought I might want to put some weight on my tripod to keep it still. But my camera bag weighs in more than the tripod's total weight capacity.

    Instead, I took my water bottle, which holds 24 ounces of liquid — about 1.5 pounds — and hung it on the hook with the carabiner I used to attach it to my camera bag when I travel.

  

    I could clip a second bottle on to it, giving additional weight and stability. And the carabiner's short enough to keep it from swinging wildly in the wind.

    In case you're wondering, here's one of the fireworks photos I took with the stabilized tripod.

    If you're looking for tips on how to shoot fireworks, Digital Photography School has some tips here.

Night-photography lighting in your pocket

    The folks over at Digital Photography School had suggestions on how to use your cellphone for dramatic night photos.

    In the article, it suggested using the LED lamp on your smart phone as a key light for portraits. It throws adequate light on the subject, while at the same time preserving the ambient light. It works better than flash which tends to create a harshly lit image of the subject against a nearly pitch-black background.

    This is not the first time someone has suggested this. Jared Polin over at FroKnowsPhoto.com has also advocated this technique for years. The best example is his photo of a meetup in front of the Kolner Dom in Cologne, Germany.

    But the DPS article acknowledges that there is a problem with this technique. The LED on the phone is not the brightest light, as it's a single bulb. That means you have to hold the phone pretty close to the subject and possibly boost your ISO to boot.

    But there's a way to shed more light on the subject without breaking the bank. Harbor Freight has 144-lumen led flashlights for less than $4 that can put out more light than a phone. I keep a few of them around my house (I usually pick them up when I get the coupon to get one free) for emergencies, but I think I might add it to my photo bag as well.

Doing long exposures without a tripod or neutral-density filters

    In the last entry, I told you how to make a variable neutral-density filter so you can get long-exposure photos even in broad daylight.

    Now, I'll show you how to do it without using a filter, or even a tripod for that matter. I found this tip on Digital Photography School, and I found it works beautifully for the most part.

    I'll give you the tl;dr version of the article: Take multiple pictures of a scene, load them into Photoshop as layers, convert them into a smart object and then set your stack mode to "mean", which will cause the moving elements to blur, giving you the long-exposure effect you're looking for.

    Here's an example I did. If you're a fan of "Twin Peaks," you'll recognize Snoqualmie Falls.

I shot this with a shutter speed of 1/6 of a second, and while it blurs the water somewhat, it wasn't what I was hoping for. So, I took about 11 more pictures, with the same setting and then merged them.

This is the finished result.

    As you can see the water has a much smoother effect that would normally be the result of a much longer exposure than I could have got under the existing conditions. It is more of what I was looking for.

    So now you have another tool you can use when you want to get a long-exposure effect.