gardenersassistant wrote:
No you don't.
These were "tripod assisted" - tripod used somewhat like a monopod, i.e. with hands on the camera. For rather obscure reasons I decided to keep that post very short (I tend to write rather too much for many people's taste.) I've only used this tripod assisted approach in the last couple of sessions - prior to that it was almost all hand-held (4K, with G80 and FZ330). I haven't done any like for like (hand-held vs tripod assisted) comparisons so I can't say for sure that those are any better than they would have been hand-held.
I did a like for like test this afternoon of eight subjects using 6K post focus with an Olympus 60mm macro on a G9, using available light. I first captured the subject three times using a tripod, hands-on. I then detached the camera from the tripod trying to keep the camera in the same position, and then captured the subject as many times as I felt like trying hand-held (six for most of the subjects).
For each scene I chose one of the three tripod-assisted captures. After the first subject I just chose the third "take" each time because all three looked so similar when I played them (in PhotoFun Studio, which is very convenient for having a quick look at the videos, and you can also get Exif data).
I looked at all of the hand-held captures for the scene and wanted to choose the least wobbly one, but that was tricky - for the most part they wobbled "differently" rather than obviously better/worse. I just tried to avoid the ones with really nasty looking wobbles).
For the chosen tripod-assisted one I loaded it into Helicon Focus and chose which frames to use and stacked it. I then used the same method and parameters for the chosen hand-held one. I didn't do any retouching (I generally do), so the stacks show some imperfections that I would normally try to hide with retouching. I produced TIFF files and then imported them into Lightroom where I pulled the highlights down for some of them (nothing else). I used the same highlight adjustment on both versions. I then exported JPEGs.
There are 1400 pixel high versions of the eight pairs in this album at Flickr.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/gardeners ... 7324907448
There are full size versions of the eight pairs in this album at Flickr.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/gardeners ... 3852820271
You can tell which stacking method and parameters I used from the end of the filename.
In one case (Example 5) there was a halo that really annoyed me in the hand-held version so I tried it with different stacking parameters and the halo went away. There are JPEGs of both hand-held stacks for that subject.
In one case (Example 7) I got a fairly horrible result for the tripod-assisted version and tried one of the other two "takes" for it, and that was significantly better (still not very good, but that was the case for the hand-held one too. I find that subjects can be quite variable as to whether they will work or not.)
As well as hand-shake, there was a slight breeze, which added some extra randomness to the exercise, much more for some subjects than for others.
My conclusions from this little exercise:
Working hand-held is much quicker and more flexible.
Framing/composition can be more precise (you can "work nearer the edges") with the tripod, and holding the same position for multiple "takes" is physically less taxing (and when you have to wait a while between "takes", waiting for a lull in the breeze, it can become quite taxing).
Working hand-held means you lose the edges of the frame because of the effects of hand-shake, with the size of the loss increasing as the magnification increases.
Working hand-held can produce some artefacts that tripod-assisted doesn't.
[This is a tentative conclusion, I noticed only one example of it (or I assume it is an example of it), the halo in Example 5, but I haven't examined the stacks in great detail. There may be more examples that I haven't noticed. Anyway, the existence of artefacts resulting from hand-shake would make sense of some of my recent experience with easier to process stacking when working tripod-assisted.]
Apart from any extra artefacts that might come with working hand-held, the image quality was really rather similar as between hand-held and tripod-assisted. The sharpness/detail might be slightly better with the tripod-assisted versions if you look very closely, but there doesn't seem to be much in it. (But it you look more carefully than I have then perhaps you will see more of a difference.)
Overall, I'm going to go on using the tripod, hands-on, but I won't be afraid to take the camera off the tripod to reach an awkwardly positioned subject more easily (or at all), or if I feel the tripod is cramping my style and I just feel like working more flexibly for a while.