In the world of photography, capturing the perfect shot often requires meticulous attention to detail. From adjusting camera settings to framing the subject just right, photographers invest significant effort in creating stunning visuals. However, amidst all the technicalities, there is one often overlooked but indispensable tool that can make or break the outcome of a photograph: the tripod.

Acting as the pillar of stability, the tripod provides an essential foundation for photographers to achieve sharpness, clarity, and creative control in their images. Choosing the right tripod is of paramount importance and can significantly impact the quality of a photograph.

Weight: Finding the Perfect Balance 

The weight of your tripod is a crucial consideration, especially if you frequently shoot in different locations or need to carry your gear for extended periods. Opting for a tripod that strikes a balance between being lightweight and sturdy is essential. Lightweight tripods are ideal for travel and long hikes, as they are easier to carry. However, ensure that the tripod is still robust enough to provide stability for your camera and lens combination.

Sturdiness: A Solid Foundation 

A sturdy tripod is the backbone of stability in photography. It provides a solid foundation for your camera, preventing unwanted camera shake and allowing you to capture sharp images, particularly in low-light situations or during long exposures. Look for tripods made from durable materials such as carbon fiber or aluminum, as these provide excellent stability without adding excessive weight.

Ease of Use: Streamlining Your Workflow 

An easy-to-use tripod enhances your workflow and allows you to focus on capturing the perfect shot. Consider the tripod’s leg-locking mechanism—whether it uses clasps, twist locks, or a combination of both. Clasps provide quick and convenient adjustments, while twist locks offer added security once locked into position.

Another factor to consider is the ease of adjusting the tripod’s height and angle. Look for intuitive leg-lock mechanisms that allow for smooth adjustments and quick setup. Some tripods also offer features such as a center column with a rapid adjustment system or a reversible center column that enables low-angle shooting, further enhancing versatility and ease of use.

Stability: Ensuring Shake-Free Shots 

Stability is paramount when it comes to tripods. A wobbly or unstable tripod defeats its purpose and can compromise image quality. Look for tripods with features that enhance stability, such as leg angles that allow for low-level shooting or adjustable leg sections that enable setting up on uneven terrain.

Additionally, consider the tripod’s maximum load capacity. Ensure it can support the weight of your camera and lens combination comfortably, with some margin for added accessories like a flash or telephoto lens. Choosing a tripod with a higher load capacity than your current setup allows for future equipment upgrades without needing to invest in a new tripod.

Ball Heads: Enhancing Flexibility and Precision 

Tripod ball heads are critical components that determine the versatility and precision of your tripod setup. Choose one that is smooth and offers precise control over the movement of your camera. A high-quality ball head enables you to easily adjust the camera’s position for framing and composition. Look for features such as a separate locking knob for panning and a built-in spirit level for precise leveling.

Selecting the right tripod is a crucial decision for photographers looking to achieve stability, ease of use, and exceptional image quality. By considering factors such as weight, sturdiness, ease of use, stability, and the different types of clasps and ball heads available, you can make an informed choice that aligns with your photography needs.

Remember, a high-quality tripod is an investment in the foundation of your photographic work. It provides stability, eliminates camera shake, and allows you to explore various shooting techniques such as long exposures and low-light photography. So, take the time to research and choose a tripod that complements your gear, style, and shooting requirements. With the right tripod supporting your camera, you’ll have the confidence to capture stunning images and elevate your photography to new heights.

Do you have more to add to this article? Let’s continue the conversation in the comments below 

Posted on August 7, 2023 by Sonoma Valley Sun

Learn how to create more compelling travel photos through a talk by international photographer, author, and documentary producer, Russ Johnson, entitled, Way to Go: Traveling with an Artist’s Eye. The Sonoma-based artist will teach how to go beyond the selfie to observe and capture people and places and see the world in a different way.

Johnson’s talk and reception takes place Wednesday August 9, 2023 from 5:30pm to 6:30pm at Vintage House, Sonoma, 264 1st St. East, and is open to the public. The Vintage House gallery will also host an exhibit of more than 20 of his best local and worldwide photographs available for purchase August 7 – 31, 2023. 

Vintage House showcases the work of Arts Guild of Sonoma artists each month and regularly presents a variety of speakers and performers on Wednesday evenings.

Johnson has worked as a photographer, filmmaker, and writer in more than sixty countries for clients including several cruise lines, American Express the UN, the countries of Nepal and Thailand and the State of California.

He will demonstrate how to use a camera as a tool to look closely and dive deeply into the subjects that reveal themselves while traveling. He will be joined by his wife, Pat Meier-Johnson, Sonoma’s Treasure Artist of 2022 whose painting tips are relevant to photography as well. 

Over the years the couple has photographed and painted scenes around the world while engaging in an exciting dialogue about art: what is meaningful, what is beautiful, what is funny or troubling, examining subjects, shapes, colors, and light. 

Russ will also introduce two photo books: Street Level: Walking the Streets and Backroads of the World and Patterns and Distractions, his collection of patterns, shapes, shadows, and natural and human-made abstracts.  

Johnson has donated his talents to produce more than 25 short documentaries for Sonoma non-profits since moving to Sonoma with his wife, Pat Meier-Johnson, in 2011. He has produced documentaries ranging from the California prison system to the future of travel, with Arthur C. Clarke. His audio stories have been featured on NPR stations and on his satirical podcast Gone Astray.  He is author of “Tales of the Radio Traveler,” which combines radio lore with a romp around the world. 

You can find more of his work on and his Gone Astray podcast on russelljohnson.com and on his pioneering online travel magazine, www.connectedtraveler.com, which has been featured on CNN, CBS, the BBC, Time and USA Today, among others.  Lonely Planet has praised it as “Armchair travel at its best.” 

Photo: Winding Way-Lakeville Highway, by Russell Johnson

Ming Smith, “Amen Corner Sisters (Harlem, New York), 1977, archival pigment print, 24 x 36 inches. Image and work courtesy Ming Smith Studio.

Janice Bond first met Ming Smith ten years ago. In 2020, when Bond became deputy director at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, she started talking to Smith about a museum retrospective that has finally come to fruition now, after Bond has left CAMH to open her own space, Art Is Bond. Not content with “conceiving” a retrospective — as noted on the museum’s website — Bond organized a synergetic outpouring of Smith’s work. Thus, there are three Ming Smith shows currently on view in Houston: one in “a cruise ship,” as Bond calls the CAMH (the museum’s acute angles do resemble some kind of naval transport), and two in “boats”: her gallery and Barbara Davis Gallery. Bond wants to create “a critical mass around this historic moment” of different generations and economic brackets, even though the shows exhibit similar, or in some cases, the same work, albeit in different sizes. 

By “historic moment,” Bond means Smith’s largest museum show to date. But the moment is years in the making, and the context of the photographer’s rise to the museum level bears some scrutiny. It started through another artist’s sustained attention. In 2017 Arthur Jafa had a show at the zenith of art world visibility, the Serpentine Galleries in London. Jafa decided to share the podium with Norwegian collage artist Frida Orupabo, YouTube creator Missylanyus, and Ming Smith, who he championed as “the greatest Afro-American photographer ever.” Since then, she’s received a lot of attention in the gallery and the U.S. museum world, culminating in a recent lifetime achievement award from the International Center for Photography. Reaching this peak took time, and the institutional biases of race and gender are not entirely to blame, even though they are ever-present. Rather, it’s her curiosity towards all the disparate corners of the visible world a camera can capture that has made her an unlikely subject for museum attention, which oftentimes favors a sense of closure in a given artist’s trajectory. 

Smith started taking photos with her mother’s camera when she was five. Supporting herself with a modeling career, she gained recognition early on when Black Photographers Annual, a showcase book published by Ebony magazine, published her portfolio in the very first issue of 1973 and continued to print her photos in all subsequent editions. That same year, Smith had a solo show at Cinandre, a hairdresser salon doubling as a social club a couple of blocks from Central Park in New York. In 1975, she became the first and only female member of a Harlem photographer collective Kamoinge, alongside Anthony Barboza, Louis Draper, Alger Cowans, and others. 

Ming Smith, “Grace Jones at Cinandre,” 1974, archival pigment print, 24 x 36 inches. Image and work courtesy Ming Smith Studio.

In an introduction to the Annual’s first edition, Toni Morrison saw the photography book as hovering “over the matrix of black life.” That phrase can describe Ming Smith’s unique position, too: she could be formal, going after urban texture in one moment and social the next, never stopping to box her intuitive orientation through geographies and scenes of Black life in a restrictive bottled message. The CAMH exhibition relays this lack of stilted logic perfectly, mixing iconic images from different eras and series with a recent video work in collaboration with her son, Mingus Murray, and a sound box with music from her ex-husband David Murray, which includes “Ming,” a title composition from his 1980 album that features her on the cover. “Ming is a dreamer,” Bond says, and the show is supposed to be “reflective not only of her work, but of the energetic process.” 

Smith’s moment in Houston may be historic, but the lightness of touch betrays no gravity, even when the subjects clearly “have something very heavy on their minds … sometimes so heavy as to be timeless, as in Ming Smith’s ancestral — and yet absolutely present — confrontation,” as James Baldwin noted in his introduction to the 3rd issue of Black Photographers Annual. Both as a model and Murray’s touring companion, Smith traveled through the States, Europe, Japan, and several African countries.

Unsurprisingly, she often gravitated towards music and photographed a lot of avant-garde jazz’s prominent players. These photos are unusual in that Smith allows for a lot of negative space around the figure(s), leaving room for random background ambience. This way a portrait becomes pictorial, not commemorative. Even when a figure is foregrounded, as in the case of Smith’s famous shots of Sun Ra, it dissolves into the air, making the legendary bandleader a cross between a Christmas tree and an alien pilot. Smith also befriended young Grace Jones and took playful pictures of her that could be placed among the very best in the performer’s vast visual biography. Smith’s interest in fiction has also led her to inhabit the world of playwright August Wilson’s characters for a series made in Pittsburg. 

Installation view of “Ming Smith: Feeling the Future” at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2023. Photo by Sean Fleming.

A seemingly endless variety of subjects and topics makes Smith’s shows feel pleasantly observational. Photographers often have a fixed viewpoint, print size, and skew the horizon just so, but Smith follows no set recipe. This makes her hard to categorize. Photography is often evaluated through its weaponizing by controlling institutions. There exists a venerable tradition of understanding the medium through its use by the power in locations that need surveillance — the colonies, the cities, the market. Individual artistic choices in photography are seen, therefore, as fugitive from the types of profiling that the state or the corporation does. An artist who unveils the surveillance tactics in a gesture of Brechtian estrangement is also much more visible to the cultural systems of talent registration. That is why fellow female photographers Carrie Mae Weems or Lorna Simpson — while younger than Smith — have already had solo shows in multiple museums, including CAMH, in the 1990s, on the strength of their efforts to clarify the mechanics of racial profiling. This type of conceptual criticality finds exhibition opportunities much more often than anything elusive or painterly. 

Smith does not do estrangement, so to position her advantageously in the alternative bureaucracies of high art she needed a translation. Jafa’s involvement in Ming Smith’s career makes sense. He’s a quintessentially topical artist, and his politics is very visibly stitched into the images he makes or uses. Jafa volunteered to put her in the right context, and his reading of Smith in a 2020 interview for her Aperture monograph remains among the most incisive. “Black people get tight around photos,” Jafa tells Greg Tate, “because… there’s always a danger that the photograph can be used as evidence against you in some fashion.” In many of Ming’s shots, he posits, “you can’t identify anybody.” 

According to an Artforum review by Chloe Wyma, Smith’s work displays a “purported rejection of the medium’s probative burden,” but it also addresses the invisibility of its subjects. This is a topic that is central for much of Black photography, either conceptual or straight. Carrie Mae Weems notes in an interview that “black folks operate under a cloud of invisibility.” “Lorna Simpson,” writes Marta Gili, “analyzes the way in which we imagine the invisible through the visible, while unmasking the prejudices that accompany us when it comes to reconstructing what is not shown.”

Smith’s first art break came in 1979 with the sale of two photographs to MoMA after the museum hosted an open call. When asked by a MoMA curator to choose the shots herself, she decided on a portrait of David Murray, because she did not see a lot of black men on the museum walls. Later, Smith made a series called Invisible Man (1988-1991) in honor of the Ralph Ellison 1952 classic book, and took on societal blind spots, capturing people in motion, folding into darkness, or resembling ink smudges. The titular image of the series has become the centerpiece of a small MoMA monograph published in 2020. It shows a tall hunched figure plodding through the night snow. We presume the figure is Black, but it could be anyone lost in severe weather. 

Installation view of “Ming Smith: Feeling the Future” at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2023. Photo by Sean Fleming.

Surveillance and invisibility are concepts, though, and Ming Smith chooses movement over mind. One of the reasons she went to New York was to take dance lessons, as Ohio ballet schools did not allow Black kids. She’s been interested in Katherine Dunham’s modern dance system since the 1970s. Smith frequently compares photography to dance, saying both are states of extreme mental acuity. In an interview with Greg Tate, she said that her dark and textured nude studies were influenced by the dynamics of Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss. Movement makes itself present through the impressionistic ripple effect that she’s often after. Be it iridescent snowflakes or Sun Ra’s gleaming cloak, Harlem night scenes or strokes of paint that she often uses to enhance the image, Smith presses the shutter not to capture the fleeting moment, but to manifest its evanescence. 

Ming Smith: Feeling the Future is on view in the Arts Museum Houston through October 1, 2023. Ming Smith: Catching the Light is on view at Art is Bond and Barbara Davis Gallery through September 2, 2023.