Steadying Shots With A Wannabe Monopod

I don't have a steady hand. In fact, sometimes it seems like I'm so unsteady, that I have to shoot at a much faster shutter speed than a normal person would, in order to avoid blurring my subject. I don't own a monopod, but would like to acquire one someday. Before laying out the money for one, I wanted to see if using a monopod would actually help steady my shots. Turning a tripod into a quasi-monopod is easy. Just leave all the legs folded up into their full vertical positions and then extend one of the legs. What better place to test out my mono/tripod than during a stroll through downtown Redwood City at night? There were a lot of neat things I wanted to photograph without an ugly flash ruining the scene. I wanted to keep my ISO low in order to reduce noise. I also didn't want my aperture to be too wide open, because I wanted to increase my depth of field in order to ensure that more of the scene stayed in focus. My only option was to increase my exposure time.Exposure: 52.5mm focal length, 1/20 sec, f/4.5, ISO 400, 5:40pm. As you can see in the photo above, my exposure time was a long 1/20 sec compared to my lens's 52.5mm focal length, yet there is very little blurring of the stationary objects in the photo (namely the ice sculpture). At that focal length, if the camera were handheld, a common rule of thumb states that to avoid blurring, the exposure time should be no longer than 1/50 sec. Given my shaky hands, I didn't want to go longer than 1/100 sec ;-) Unfortunately, I forgot to take comparison photos of the scene while I (1) held the camera with my hand and (2) set the camera on top of my fully extended tripod. Using a monopod does not completely prevent blurring, only a tripod comes close to completely isolating a camera from shaky hands, but supporting a camera on a monopod goes a long way towards reducing blurring. Go here to see Brian's shot of me and my wannabe monopod.