What is your equipment? Let me guess, D800E with 70-200 f/2.8 vr ii
My opinion is - unless you're a pro, that needs to sell photos and make poster-sized prints... that level of equipment is completely unnecessary.
Actually, I disapprove of DSLR's in the audience anyway - I think people who use them are selfish and inconsiderate. They are distractingly noisy for people nearby, and the lenses may be so large that they obstruct the view of their neighbours, or even smack them in the face. Or force them to sit uncomfortably and keep one eye on the photographer, to
avoid getting smacked in the face. I am pleased that many venues ban such cameras.
I used cameras like that myself for many years, but I got fed up of carrying those big noisy clunkers, and a bag of lenses. And I never used them in the audience at skate competitions etc anyway. I switched entirely to "bridge" cameras years ago - once they reached a certain level of speed and performance. The results are perfectly adequate for viewing onscreen, or printing up to A4.
For my still photos I currently use a Panasonic FZ1000. Previously I used a Panasonic FZ200 which gave pretty similar results, but is not quite as fast or sophisticated as the FZ1000. Both are very quiet and compact compared to the DSLR equivelents. I use the FZ1000 for video sometimes too. And my wife's video camera (used for the video I linked) is a Panasonic V550. We do everything hand-held, no tripods or monopods.
Both the FZ1000 and V550 have 5-axis image stabilisation and "auto-level" for video recording... which are
awesome - if you can hold a camera
fairly steady, and pan
fairly smoothly, your video can look like you were using a tripod.
Which is why I think it is definitely a psychological problem, at least in part.
