Multiple exposures
Using a tripod gives you plenty of options for multiple exposure techniques, such as shooting parts of a scene at different shutter speeds to later combine in Photoshop
There are many reasons why you might need to shoot two or more elements in a scene and combine them together in a single image in Photoshop, and the post-production work will be far easier if the camera doesn’t move between exposures.
Multiple exposure shots don’t have to be something dramatic: recently in Dartmoor I was photographing a river in Dewerstone Wood. I used a 15-second exposure to blur the water, but the slight wind was also blurring the ferns in the foreground. This was annoying as it detracted from the blur of the river. Without moving the camera, I changed the settings so that I could use an exposure of 1/60 second, which was plenty to eliminate the slight motion of the ferns. To improve the focus I also refocused more on the foreground so I didn’t have to rely on depth of field to keep it sharp.
Back home, it was a simple matter of processing both images to the same settings, then opening them in Photoshop. I used the lasso tool to loosely select around the non-moving parts of the foreground, then applied a light feather and copied. Moving to the other image, I used the Paste in Place command, which copies it to exactly the same place in the second image with pixel-perfect precision. As the camera hadn’t moved, it lined up perfectly. The result is subtle, but very effective.
If you have a tripod with you, then photographing different parts of the scene with different settings isn’t the only multiple exposure technique that you can add to your photographic arsenal. It could also be used to combine two different elements in the same picture, or to lift an animal or bird from one frame and place it into another where the light is better, or maybe when an obstruction has moved from the background.
The post-production work for multiple exposure shots will be far easier if the camera doesn’t move between exposures