early evening landscape photos come out blurry/grainy

[theregoesjb]

about 15 min after sunset i took a picture (and used a tripod with a 2 second timer) of this wide open area; its sort of this swamp/river area of the charles river but all the trees have already lost their foliage, sort of an endless array of spires with mossy green and brown colors. they were really well lit and I thought the contrast would make for a good picture. it honestly looked interesting at the time.

However it came out like crap, very grainy/blurry... just sort of blah, nothing looks clear. Dont know if it was the low light since no direct sunlight was on them (the sun set more or less behind the camera)

I took about 20 shots trying different settings but was surprised when they all came out so poor.

the uploaded wouldnt let me load the pic but heres some settings from a couple that actually had better colors, but still came out blurry/grainy

F-8
shutter speed: 1/3s
ISO: 401

Or

F-7.7
shutter speed: 1s
ISO: 73

ISO was on auto but i got a variety from adjusting the other settings. I also used a bracketing feature that takes pictures with +2 & -2 exposure in hopes that id get a good pic.

Does anything jump out as being bad settings for late in the day, after sunset picture ?

 

[tirediron]

Without the images it's impossible to say. Try uploading them to Flickr, Image Shack, or one of the other free hosting services and then embed them in your post using the [ img ] tags. There's a pinned thread at the top of the Beginner forum that explains how to post images.

 

[joealcantar]

Where's the images?

 

[theregoesjb]

yeah I should have just figured it out the first time... thanks for any input

F-8
shutter speed: 1/3s
ISO: 401

and:

F-7.7
shutter speed: 1s
ISO: 73

 

[tirediron]

Nothing wrong with the images; it's the conditions. You're trying to take a shot at a time when there isn't really sufficient light, and you're using equipment that doesn't have the capability to deal with the situation. This is a good lesson in "Things are a lot darker to the camera's eye than they are to ours". If your camera has the ability to shoot in full manual, you might have seen some improvement by increasing your aperture (smaller f #), but the difference in light between the top of the sky and the dark foreground (dynamic range) means that you're not really going to be able to get a good shot without some special equipment./technique. Ideally, using graduated neutral density filters would have been the way to go, but failing that, if you camera has the ability to spot-meter, you could have metered three different points in the scene (darkest, middle brightest), taken one shot of each (From the tripod, WITHOUT moving the camera) and combined them in software to create a high-dynamic range merge or "HDR". Unfortunately digital sensor noise is an unavoidable by-product of under-exposure.

 

[analog.universe]

These look underexposed to me, I agree with shooting in full manual, as it's difficult to meter a scene like this.

I'm wondering if what you're seeing is actually noise, or artifacts from the jpg compression. I'm actually not seeing much noise in these, but they look extremely compressed. You should be using the highest quality compression option on your camera. You can always compress more later if you need small files.

 

[theregoesjb]

that jpeg/compression look is how the raw files look too. I am using a canon sx 130 is (a P&S with fairly good manual options) and I also have the CHDK firmware which gives it more options as well as the raw file capability.
Under the brightness settings there is "evaluative" , "center weighted" , and "spot" which says "set brightness based on center frame area". Is this the same as spot metering?