Handheld photography is very liberating. Being unencumbered with gear is great feeling. Responding to a moment is satisfying too. I had to use a tripod in much of my assignment work over the years and I always found it to be tedious and labor intensive. I am not steady of hand either, so I need to pick a fast shutter speed, at 1/125 or faster and if I want good depth of field get to at least F8, depending on the lens. So, all I need to do is find the right ISO that allows me to do that. And with today’s cameras and software, I am not afraid to shoot at 10,000 ISO. 3200 usually woks quite nicely. And given in my film days I used all kinds of high-speed film, I am a big fan of grain. I found long ago that using a tripod slowed me down a great deal and my images were quite static. The one exception was my above Seattle work. It required a tripod for long exposures, but I would already be in that mode because I was shooting real estate stuff at the same time. But the funny thing was I couldn’t take exposures longer than 3 seconds from those high rise condo balconies. Anything longer was affected by building movement. Weird but true.
