Having trouble with Soft focusing for some reason

[PropilotBW]

I know the reason, it's user error!!
I'm having difficulty taking really sharp pictures with the Olympus 75-300 II. I have my EM-5II on S-AF, and small spot focusing. I lock focus on the eye, and hold the focus, and reframe the shot. This is photo is the result. All I have done to the photo is crop...no other adjustments.
This should have been a tack-sharp photo, but I am disappointed with the result.

Here is another example.

I never had issues like this before with the Nikon D5100.

 

[Derrel]

These are at 1/499 and 1/1000 second--with FLASH...that can lead to a very slight ghost image at times, especially in brighter, outdoor light levels like this. The problem is called ghosting...this looks like a mild case of ghosting. At times, it can be VERY bad, and very obvious, but this is just barely perceptible, but yet it is there and is hurting the sharpness of the images. I first looked at the top image and thought to myself, "Looks like slight camera shake...slight blurring on the edge of the lizzard." I looked at the second full-sized image as well,and thought the same thing. After that, I pulled the EXIF data, which confirmed my suspicions...the flash + daylight is an overlaying of two exposures...one made by flash, the other by the daylight illumination. AGain--this is mild ghosting, almost imperceptible, almost unrecognizable.

 

[PropilotBW]

These are at 1/499 and 1/1000 second--with FLASH...that can lead to a very slight ghost image at times, especially in brighter, outdoor light levels like this. The problem is called ghosting...this looks like a mild case of ghosting. At times, it can be VERY bad, and very obvious, but this is just barely perceptible, but yet it is there and is hurting the sharpness of the images. I first looked at the top image and thought to myself, "Looks like slight camera shake...slight blurring on the edge of the lizzard." I looked at the second full-sized image as well,and thought the same thing. After that, I pulled the EXIF data, which confirmed my suspicions...the flash + daylight is an overlaying of two exposures...one made by flash, the other by the daylight illumination. AGain--this is mild ghosting, almost imperceptible, almost unrecognizable.

Thanks for the reply, Derrel, I appreciate your time.

I'm not sure why the EXIF data shows flash, I didn't have a flash even attached to the camera. That's odd...

 

[PropilotBW]

You may be right with the camera shake issue. I had it fully zoomed to 300mm... Still at 1/1000 I would have thought it's plenty fast enough to compensate.

 

[Derrel]

Do you have the camera's stabilization system enabled? That is another possibility. If the sensor is exactly as stated, 17.3mm wide, then on image P7130074.jpg, my calculations have that image as a 266x magnification of the sensor size.

I went back and looked...not sure how the image was processed but the 4607 pixel-wide image P7130074 is a paltry 471KB...how does the image look at a more reasonable 2.3 to 6 megabytes in size?

 

[PropilotBW]

I had been limiting the quality of the photo during export so accommodate posting here.
Here is another shot, at full resolution, just curious how this one looks in comparison?
if it says it, there was no flash.

 

[Derrel]

This shot of the skipper looks very low-resolution...and it almost looks like reawlllllllly heavy noise reduction was performed on the image.