Starting out

[blaze519]

Hello everyone

I recently (last week) started a new hobby, as you can geuss i want to learn to take pictures. My sister bought a pretty OK camera several years ago but never really used it so to get my hobby strated i used her camera. It is a nikon coolpix p500. To start off i went to the sea with just one goal, get a few sharp pictures. After reviewing the pictures i realised ofcourse that most of the pictures wern't scharp at all. Why do you guys think my photo isn't sharp? I think that most of them are just motion blur but maybe I am just missing a lot of things. Can you help me out?

settings i used :

setting i used :

Thanks for helping me out and have a great day

Greetings Brecht

 

[photo1x1.com]

Hi Brecht and welcome to the forum.
It is a little hard to tell from the small images - do you have bigger ones or are these crops from the original?
Is "Brandpunsafstand" the same as "focal length""?

 

[blaze519]

yes brandpuntsafstand is the same as the focal length, i will post the links to the original photos i put on google photos
https://goo.gl/photos/M6V5qWXwv6QRDGp87
https://goo.gl/photos/ELkXjdzUyW6b6A3P7
https://goo.gl/photos/PpMHQyHfdJQJ3Hbo6

 

[Designer]

The long shots of boats are shot at the practical limit of hand-held shots using that particular lens. You should learn to hold the camera very steady, and use a faster shutter speed.

The shrub is sharp due to a combination of the shorter focal length and faster shutter.

 

[photo1x1.com]

Designer seems to be right - there is some slight camera shake. How camera shake is introduced is a long story.
To avoid that you usually should go for a shutter speed of 1/focal lenght for handheld shots. That focal length though is calculated for a full frame sensor. In your case, the sensor is much smaller so you first would have to calculate it using the so called crop factor. For Sensors like yours (1/2.3"), that would be roughtly 5,6 (check this graph). The focal length you used for these two shots was 144mm - multiply that with 5,6 and you´ll get roughly 800 - so you´ll need a shutter speed of 1/800th to get a sharp image without camera shake. This is just a rule of thumb because some people manage to hold their cams steadier than others.

In general your camera is OK to start with, but of course the small sensor has its limitations.
Did you set the jpg image quality to the best possible option? Especially the bush, but also the others seems to suffer from compression artifacts which is often due to the image quality settings in camera.

 

[blaze519]

Designer seems to be right - there is some slight camera shake. How camera shake is introduced is a long story.
To avoid that you usually should go for a shutter speed of 1/focal lenght for handheld shots. That focal length though is calculated for a full frame sensor. In your case, the sensor is much smaller so you first would have to calculate it using the so called crop factor. For Sensors like yours (1/2.3"), that would be roughtly 5,6 (check this graph). The focal length you used for these two shots was 144mm - multiply that with 5,6 and you´ll get roughly 800 - so you´ll need a shutter speed of 1/800th to get a sharp image without camera shake. This is just a rule of thumb because some people manage to hold their cams steadier than others.

In general your camera is OK to start with, but of course the small sensor has its limitations.
Did you set the jpg image quality to the best possible option? Especially the bush, but also the others seems to suffer from compression artifacts which is often due to the image quality settings in camera.

Thanks for replying and yes hte quality settings was on the best option but maybe by importing them to google photo's they may have been compressed

 

[dasmith232]

In addition to the other factors (above) that affect image quality, the P500 is a "super-zoom" camera, which is actually a super-zoom lens. Super-zoom sounds like a great thing, like superman. Who wouldn't want a superman lens?

The problem is that there is no superman lens. More zoom requires more pieces of glass and more movement among those pieces. You can create a sharp lens with lots of pieces of glass, but the position, size and placement of those pieces of glass need to be super, super precise. With more movement in a lens (like a super-zoom), there is no way to avoid losing sharpness.

This is why the professional-grade lenses don't zoom very far. A professional photographer will have one lens that goes from 24 mm to 70mm, and then a separate lens that goes from 70mm to 200mm, and then even more lenses... You get the idea. That's because by keeping the range low, the quality can be higher.

A super-zoom lens simply can't be as sharp.