Garden picture focus trouble

[Ogrefcf]

I have been trying to take some pictures of my Hosta beds and no matter what I try I can seem to be able to get them in focus. Is it just to much green or am I doing something? I am shooting from a tripod and have my F stop at 22 in this picture. I have tried many different stops, focus modes, manual focus mode and am stumped. Any help ideas? I uploaded it to Flicker so it has the Exif info. This is the photo right out of the camera only thing done is it was converted to a jpeg. Thanks in advance


016_01 by ogrefcf, on Flickr

 

[amolitor]

Looks ok to me. Any lens is going to start getting a bit soft at f/22. Try it around f/8 or so, you should like the results better.

You don't need f/22 when you're at 18mm, your depth of field is already enormous at f/8 when you're going wide angle like that.

 

[grandpa_chris]

f/22 isn't helping you here. If anything it's hurting you. Diffraction begins to set in at that small of an aperture and will degrade sharpness across the entire photo. Because you used f/22 the shutter speed was 1/8th of a second. Your camera has a reflex mirror that's a source of vibration and that vibration can degrade sharpness even on a tripod. Did you have VR active? Make sure and turn VR off when the camera is on a tripod. Finally, if you have the camera's multi-point focus system active the camera will likely focus forward. Multi-point focusing is another term for focus on whatever is closest.

 

[H4X1MA]

Oops, chris already said it >.<

Make sure you shut off the VR is you are using a tripod as well.

 

[Ogrefcf]

VR was on. Forgot to turn it off. Thanks again! Going to try to get them sharper this week.