Vibration Compensation on a tripod

It is popular knowledge that if you are shooting with a tripod, you should turn off VR on your Nikkor lens.  I have shot on tripods with my Nikkor lenses and even if I forget to turn VR off, the result is not bad--perhaps a slight blur that I don't really notice.  However, if you use a Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 VC lens, beware of the VC on a tripod!  You must turn it off.

Here is a crop of a photo of the skyline of Toronto on a hazy night.  Except for the crop, the photo is unaltered in any way.  You can see these diagonal streaks of light and ghost images.  Well, that was VC at work.

I believe I wrote about this a long while ago but it was obvious I forgot about VC's issue on a tripod.

Tamron's Vibration Compensation (VC)

My first post of 2010.

I mentioned earlier that the Tamron 17-50mm I just bought has Vibration Compensation (VC). I also mentioned that through the viewfinder, you can see the image jerking a little when the VC mechanism kicks in. Normally, this is fine, but when I used the delay timer on my camera and flash, the jerking caused major problems. I am not certain which component (delay timer or flash, or some specific settings) was causing problems, but see it for yourself. Below are crops of photos I took last night.

For these shots, the camera was placed on top of a backpack as I did not bring my tripod along. The flash was my SB-800 speedlight. The camera was set to slow+rear sync with the flash. I set the timer to 10 seconds, just long enough for me to run into the picture.

This crop of a photo, shot with VC, clearly shows the jerking:


On the spot, I initially attributed the blur to a possible camera shake as the camera was placed on a backpack with a big speedlight flash on the hotshoe so it could have been unstable. However, three consecutive shots gave the same result. It dawned on me then it could have been the Vibration Compensation -- yes, VC should not have been turned on in the first place, but with the Nikkor 18-200mm VR lens, I never had problems leaving VR on on a tripod.

Here was another shot without VC:


Know your gears. Know their quirks. Know their limitations.

Happy New Year! Happy Shooting!