Please help, no clear pictures

[dylan82]

Hi guys,

I would love some help, as I have bought a canon 600d recently, and have tried all all i know to try and get the pictures even a bit sharp. I often use the manual setting, and believe I have the iso and aperture working ok, but maybe not. The first shot I have attached in this setting is with an iso of 800, aperture 4, the second in blue i then tried with a flash to try and make it cleaer. I have recently read about shooting in raw, but not sure if that's going to hep with this or not

Any tips would be great

 

[dylan82]

I see that in these examples, these shots come up quite clear. There actually not

 

[Didereaux]

Nothing wrong with your camera. In the first you are focused on the wall and not the person and the DOF is too shallow. The second one I can't find anything to fault as far as the person is concerned.

...and yes it is ALWAYS better to shoot RAW. The camera ALWAYS takes the RAW, and if set to jpeg merely does the tweaking internally...rarely as good as external apps.

 

[dylan82]

Hi Didereaux.

Oh I will have to learn how to do that then

Thanks

 

[pgriz]

There's a bunch of things that will influence your sharpness. Some are:
1) Is your auto-focus point selected by you or by the camera?
2) Is your shutter speed sufficient to prevent hand-held camera blur (this speed also depends on the focal length used)?
3) Is your depth-of-field sufficient to encompass all of your subject (assuming you're focusing at the correct place of your subject)?
4) Is your aperture at either end of the range? (at the low end, say f/1.8, you may get loss of sharpness due to lens issues, and on the high end, say f/22, you may be getting diffraction)
5) Is there enough contrast at the point your camera's looking for focus for it to be able to distinguish when it's in focus?

 

[soufiej]

Sounds as though you are not familiar with the basic rules of photography. How long have you been involved in photography? How would you rate yourself as a photographer?

 

[fjrabon]

In both it looks like you focused on the wall instead of the person, and at f/4 it very slightly threw him the tiniest bit out of focus, which made it look slightly unsharp as opposed to out of focus.

Shooting in Raw has nothing to do with how sharp an image is, in fact you will generally have to sharpen Raw images in your editing software. Raw doesn't make your images look better, it gives you more control over certain aspects of editing, so that if you edit them enough, they can look better (or at least more towards your vision) than the default settings the camera creates. I also think the first image could use a bit more contrast, which would have the effect of making it seem clearer as well.

 

[The_Traveler]

I looked at the exif and there are a great many things done in such a way as to hurt
the final image.
If you are interested I can make a list with explanations.

o hurt

 

[TCampbell]

I downloaded this to open in Canon DPP (Digital Photo Professional) to check your AF points, but unfortunately this doesn't appear to be an image directly out of the camera -- so the AF point placement info is stripped.

Open the image on your local computer using your Canon Digital Photo Professional. Right-click on the image and in the pop-up menu, select "AF Points". The software will over-lay the 9 AF points of your camera but will highlight the AF point (or points) which achieved a focus lock -- so you'll know what the camera really used for focus (just note that if you lock focus on one point, then re-compose the shot, then the AF point would no longer be over whatever was used to lock focus... but if you didn't focus & recompose, it should be accurate.)

Normally a photographer would want to put the focus point on the subject's "dominant" eye (in the event that one eye is closer... it'd be the eye that you can see more clearly which usually is the closest one.)

It looks to me like you used an AF point on the wall to lock focus.

A higher f-stop (aperture value) would also have helped... e.g. f/5.6 or even f/8. I see you were shooting at 1/60th here... it'll be important that neither you nor your subject move (I can tell you didn't move or the wall would be blurred.) 1/60th is adequate as long as the subject is steady. If they're moving when you shoot them then it's not fast enough.