Issues with fuzzy/blurry

[shrekfx]

Hey guys, new to the site and been looking all over for a place that might be great to ask questions and seems to be a lot of knowledgeable people here. I have been messing with photos for a few years now, but my wife is the main person and does photography part time and loves it. I'm more her tech support you can say when it comes to issues with her camera and research on new gear. I think she is very good, but she has issues with photos being blurry. She shoots in manual mode and shoots in RAW. Out of her pictures, most will come out great, but the ones that she gets excited about and really wants to use ends up being blurry for some reason.

She has been using a Nikon D90 to start with but recently switched to a Nikon D7000. For the most part, she uses the Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 Lens. Here are some pictures of what we are seeing. Sorry about the large pictures.. But you will notice there is a blurriness on some of these pictures. I'll see if I can find more, or if she knows of some, but there will be some where one eye will be in focus, and the other eye isn't. Im guessing that has something to do with the depth of field.. But any help is greatly appreciated.


Shot with Tamron 17-50 at 24mm, f2.8, 1/2000, iso800

Tamron 17-50 at 35mm, f2.8, iso 400, 1/125

Tamron 17-50 at 17mm, f2.8, iso 400, 1/160

 

[tirediron]

The issue with all of these appears to be missed focus. Take for example #1; based on those settings and approximating the camera to subject distance as ~3' her depth of field was less than 6". If you look at the gentleman's tie, the area around the knot seems to be sharply focused, but his face is soft; this is because at an aperture of f2.8 there is simply not enough distance in focus. It also tells me that she was not paying attention to where the camera was focusing. Camera auto-focus systems like lots of contrast, and often don't want to focus where we want them to.

So, to rectify this: Become familiar with the DoF calculator here so that she knows how much of an image is going to be in sharp focus, and use a single focusing point which she manually places over the area of critical focus (usually the eyes). DoF depends on lens aperture, lens focal length, sensor-size and camera-to-subject distance. No lens is at its best wide-open, and unless you really need to shoot an f2.8 lens at f2.8, best results will be seen at more like f5.6.

 

[Derrel]

At close range, shooting at f/2.8 is quite often a recipe for disaster. There just is not enough depth of field at f/2.8 inside of 10 feet to consider it a good choice for "general" people work. At close distances like this, f/2.8 produces so little depth of field that the slightest mis-placement of the DOF band results in unacceptable images at any size much larger than a playing card. The PROBLEM often comes from reviewing an image shot at f/2.8 on the camera's LCD...it will look "sharp" at LCD size...but once brought back and downloaded and seen in all its "glory", there will be agony...

 

[shrekfx]

O.k. I was kinda guessing that was the case on some of the pictures and will defiantly pass that along to her. I know she always complains that she can't get her exposure right unless she has the apture wide open. I think she's scared to increase the iso because of the graininess she gets from it.

These photos don't show the motion blur I see in a lot of her pictures and I can't find the ones that are bad (im on my computer and all these are on hers and I dont have access to it right now), but I read somewhere that you want the shutter speed to be higher then the mm you are shooting at. So if you are at 25mm, you want the shutter speed to be higher then 1/25 to avoid motion blur from camera shake, is this correct?

 

[MTVision]

O.k. I was kinda guessing that was the case on some of the pictures and will defiantly pass that along to her. I know she always complains that she can't get her exposure right unless she has the apture wide open. I think she's scared to increase the iso because of the graininess she gets from it.

These photos don't show the motion blur I see in a lot of her pictures and I can't find the ones that are bad (im on my computer and all these are on hers and I dont have access to it right now), but I read somewhere that you want the shutter speed to be higher then the mm you are shooting at. So if you are at 25mm, you want the shutter speed to be higher then 1/25 to avoid motion blur from camera shake, is this correct?

Yes. If you have a 50mm lens you don't want to handhold below 1/50. Faster is usually going to be better to reduce motion blur/camera shake.

She can raise the ISO with the d7000. As long as she doesn't underexpose noise should be minimal. Noise is preferable to a blurry photo! Plus you can reduce noise in an editing program.

 

[gsgary]

As above camera settings are all to cock, settings on first shot are a bit crazy, the problem is all user error

 

[shrekfx]

O.k. I was kinda guessing that was the case on some of the pictures and will defiantly pass that along to her. I know she always complains that she can't get her exposure right unless she has the apture wide open. I think she's scared to increase the iso because of the graininess she gets from it.

These photos don't show the motion blur I see in a lot of her pictures and I can't find the ones that are bad (im on my computer and all these are on hers and I dont have access to it right now), but I read somewhere that you want the shutter speed to be higher then the mm you are shooting at. So if you are at 25mm, you want the shutter speed to be higher then 1/25 to avoid motion blur from camera shake, is this correct?

Yes. If you have a 50mm lens you don't want to handhold below 1/50. Faster is usually going to be better to reduce motion blur/camera shake.

She can raise the ISO with the d7000. As long as she doesn't underexpose noise should be minimal. Noise is preferable to a blurry photo! Plus you can reduce noise in an editing program.

Awesome.. Great input, we're noobs to the DSLR and I know practice makes perfect, but helps when someone can just explain it. Thanks again.

Except you gary, if you are going to criticize someone, especially being that rude, give some input

 

[tirediron]

As above camera settings are all to cock, settings on first shot are a bit crazy, the problem is all user error

Come on Gary... really? How about explaining what they should be? Hmmmm....

 

[Derrel]

As above camera settings are all to cock, settings on first shot are a bit crazy, the problem is all user error

Come on Gary... really? How about explaining what they should be? Hmmmm....

We are ALL different. To the newcomer....gsgary seems awfully gruff...I just wanted to give a bit of **my** personal idea of the kind of poster gsgary is...

He is, I think, a little bit of EACH one of these three types of internet forum warriors...

Grunter


Kung-Fu Master


Rottweiler Puppy

 

[gsgary]

As above camera settings are all to cock, settings on first shot are a bit crazy, the problem is all user error

Come on Gary... really? How about explaining what they should be? Hmmmm....

We are ALL different. To the newcomer....gsgary seems awfully gruff...I just wanted to give a bit of **my** personal idea of the kind of poster gsgary is...

He is, I think, a little bit of EACH one of these three types of internet forum warriors...

Grunter


Kung-Fu Master


Rottweiler Puppy

:evil: Ok in the first shot there is no point shooting at F2.8 when the wall is so close to the couple, better off shooting at about F8 @ 200mm and shoot down the wall giving a gradual blurr to the wall and tell her to use a lower iso and shutter speed, focus on that shot is about 8" behind the couple

 

[orb9220]

As mentioned just because you have f2.8 doesn't mean it's the best aperture to use for portraits.

Tamron 17-50 f2.8 @ f2.8

Baby Riley for a Visit 2 of 3 by Orbmiser, on Flickr

You can get keepers at that with careful selection of where to lock focus on.
But I prefer starting at f/4-f/5.6 for portrait shooting.

The need here also is using enough shutter speed to eliminate hand shake and yes your subjects still have micro-motion even when standing still.

Couple that with a sufficient aperture for depth of field and Good Holding & Stance & Breathing technique when taking the image. I see way to many with bad form (carried over from their P&S habits) and jabbing the shutter with their elbows sticking out for flight that results in less than stellar results.

And comes down to getting familiar and mastering the camera/lens combo used thru much practice and learning the exposure triangle of Shutter Speed/Aperture/ISO as a start. It's more than a weekend or pull out once in awhile when needed commitment.
.

 

[KmH]

Depth-of-field (DoF) is a result of several things the photographer must consider, and lens aperture is just one of them.

Soft focus happen when a fast lens is used wide open, and that softness gets aggravated by the extremely shallow DoF a close point of focus accentuates.

I recommend you and your wife also explore the fundamentals of photographic lighting and white balance.

 

[MLeeK]

On the d7000 you can really increase that ISO quite a bit. You can't fix blurry, you can fix a little bit of noise. Noise won't be a huge problem if you (she) learns to expose correctly. However, if you underexpose AT ALL and then boost in post processing then it will also boost the noise issue. If anything you want to reduce exposure in post, but never increase.

 

[SoCalTiger]

Shot with Tamron 17-50 at 24mm, f2.8, 1/2000, iso800

For this first picture, another technical error is that she bumped her ISO way higher than it needed to be. Should could have used ISO100 if she lowered her shutter to 1/250sec at that aperture. That would have been plenty fast for posed shots like this. Missed focus is the primary issue though.