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From my understanding, if you want to take a long exposure of a landscape shot like the picture below, you have two options:

1. Carry a heavy tripod everywhere you hike and then use a series of expensive ND filters to take a 30 second exposure.




2. Take a succession of quick pictures and then use image stacking software to align them and average them together in post. This has the added benefit of eliminating hot pixels and image noise.

I understand this may have been more difficult in the past due to memory card usage and computational requirements, but in 2019 is there any reason to still carry a heavy tripod and ND-filters to make long exposure photographs like this?

I'd like to comment that a tripod also makes image stacking better. By fixing the position of the camera, the tripod eliminates perspective changes. Through additional use of correct tripod technique, the tripod can also eliminate motion, allowing for long-duration shutter exposures. The two concepts are not necessarily 100% one-for-the-other.

Very good, but "dumb" image stacking, can't account for changes in perspective, which in the most fine-grained terms is the precise location of the camera's entrance pupil. So hand-holding a camera and taking, say, 50 or 100 images, while slightly moving because of body motion, may result in more images in the stack being thrown out. Worse, those images might not be thrown out, and they get averaged into the result, which slightly contribute to lower sharpness.

Now, some of the latest smartphones, with 3D depth mapping capabilities, in conjunction with really good computational photography algorithms, can theoretically deal with small perspective shifts (or if not now, then they will be able to soon, at cheaper and cheaper price points). But that's no reason to rely on technology to make up for a simple problem in technique, IMO.

Personally, I'm a fan of of the slow tripod-and-ND filter process. I enjoy taking the slow process, setting up the tripod and filters, computing the expsoure. And I like the challenge of trying to balance the exposure as correctly as possible in camera.

When it comes to scenes that also have to balance dynamic range in different zones by using graduated ND filters, image stacking may or may not yield the same results. I mean, it can yield the desired results, but you'd have to take a stack of images exposed for the lightest parts of the scene, and then take a stack of image exposed for the darkest parts of the scene, and mix those two stacks in post. It absolutely can be done (and has), but it's not the route I prefer to go, when I can just use graduated ND filters to mix the dynamic range in camera.

Well, with regards to your (1)... You could carry a light tripod (or beanbag or any other way of stabilizing a camera) and use only a single ND filter instead of several stacked filters.

With regard to (2), yes you could do that, but stacking a sequence of discrete single images will give you a result that contains several discrete non- or less-blurred images of moving objects rather than a smooth continuous image of the path of the object. That might not be important in some cases, depending on the subject matter, but then again, it might be a significant difference in the results.

For use cases where image stacking might often be the preferred technique over single long exposures, a tripod or other physical method of stabilizing the camera is still invaluable and almost always the best technique to get the best result. It also significantly reduces the time spent on post-capture work per finished image.

For me the main advantage is... Joy.

I enjoy a lot more taking photos, people places, products, rather than editing the images, especially on automated tasks, like stacking photos. Of course, there are some parts enjoyable, like tweaking the final result. But, overall, I prefer not having a ton of shots to review.

One advantage about the stacking is that you can control more of the process, for example removing people from locations, but overall, I prefer the photography side of photography, rather than the automated staking side of it.