Mike Oxlong wrote:
Would a Nikon 35mm f1.8 drastically reduce the need for a tripod for night shots, and reduce the amount of blur caused by any slight shakes while holding the camera instead?
I'm assuming you are wanting to avoid flash (as in the nice Blackpool pictures above).
The blur from hand-held depends largely on the length of the exposure, i.e. shutter speed.
At night, even a large aperture (let's say f1.4), even wide open, at a high enough shutter speed to avoid blur, isn't going to gather enough light for a decent image, so you'd have to use a slower shutter speed which, in turn requires a tripod and a cable-release to avoid the blur.
I have heard of people tying their camera firmly to a fencepost or suchlike and using a cable release (when they've forgotten to take their tripod) but haven't tried it myself, it sounded way too difficult to frame the shot.
In those Blackpool pictures, the exposure looks to be several seconds long, possibly manually-timed via cable-release, i.e. long enough for passing trams to give that white and red line effect across some of them ... and camera shake would be unavoidable hand-held with such long exposures.
