Unsharp trees, why?

[Seth94]

Hi, im just wondering why this picture look so unsharp? It was shot at f13, 1/80s iso400 at 22mm focal lenght with a d7000 with a nikon 16-85 handheld but still. I have a lot of photos that imo is very sharp, but when i shoot trees with leafs like this one they always look so blury. Is this simply because of boring/bad light or am i missing something important? Picture

 

[Overread]

You should use image tags around the direct url for the photo itself to show the picture in the thread.

[ img ] paste URL of the photo here [ /img ]

like that but without the spaces.

Further the size you've uploaded is good for the internet, but far too small to see the "softness" that you are describing. To show that you need to use a 100% crop - which is take the photo at fullsize, then crop a section out of it. This allows you to show a smaller segment of the photo at the fullsize without having to upload the whole fullsized photo to the net.



As for the softness there could be several causes:

1) Wind - at 1/80sec you will likely get some windblur in your photos. You'll have to up your shutter speed to a faster speed to help avoid this.

2) Diffraction softening at smaller apertures - really shouldn't be much of a problem at f13, however I will raise it as something to keep in mind if you shoot with yet smaller apertures (bigger f numbers). Most lenses tend to peek in sharpness around f8 and from then on dwindle - though most remain usable to around f16 (very general terms here as it does vary depending on what specific lens and camera body you are using).


The photo also looks a bit underexposed (dark). If you read the histogram on the camera I suspect you'll see a bar line (each line on a histogram chart shows 1 stop of light) on the right side almost empty of any part of the curve (ie empty of light data). This shows that you can increase the exposure (use higher ISO/slower shutter speed/wider aperture) and capture more light without overexposing the photo.

 

[fjrabon]

combo of under exposure + ISO 400 likely generated a decent amount of noise, which if you shot in JPEG with noise reduction on, the camera killed the sharpness in order to kill the noise. Plus windblur at 1/80 a sec.

 

[Seth94]

Hmmm the file uploader realy does not seem to work in any of my browsers, weird

 

[Seth94]

Here is a full version of the image, raw saved as jpg http://www2.picturepush.com/photo/a/11229535/img/a1229535.jpg

 

[Seth94]

You have right, it could possibly been caused by the wind :/

 

[Seth94]

The image was not particulary underexposed though, so that´s probably not the case. Btw is it better to shoot a handheld landscape photo with f10 and iso 1000 or f2 and iso 100? what will affect my image quality/sharpness the most? (except the obvious deph of field loss)

 

[fjrabon]

looking at the fully zoomed, full resolution version. I think it's the noise + underexposure that killed the sharpness. If it were wind, the more stationary objects in the frame would be sharper, which isn't the case. ISO 400 is pretty good on a D7000 (lol, I originally wrote this as D400, subconscious yearnings much?) unless your photo is also underexposed, sometimes the combo of ISO 400 + underexposure can cause noise to kill the sharpness a bit. Usually not this much, but I don't know what else it could be. The only other possible issue I could maybe see this being would be if somehow you accidentally focused at either the minimum focusing distance or infinity.

 

[fjrabon]

The image was not particulary underexposed though, so that´s probably not the case. Btw is it better to shoot a handheld landscape photo with f10 and iso 1000 or f2 and iso 100? what will affect my image quality/sharpness the most? (except the obvious deph of field loss)

Depends on the lens, but ISO 100 v. ISO 1000 will probably hurt your image quality more than f/2 v f/10 will.

 

[Seth94]

Okey, thank you very much for the help!

 

[2WheelPhoto]

looking at the fully zoomed, full resolution version. I think it's the noise + underexposure that killed the sharpness. If it were wind, the more stationary objects in the frame would be sharper, which isn't the case. ISO 400 is pretty good on a D7000 (lol, I originally wrote this as D400, subconscious yearnings much?) unless your photo is also underexposed, sometimes the combo of ISO 400 + underexposure can cause noise to kill the sharpness a bit. Usually not this much, but I don't know what else it could be. The only other possible issue I could maybe see this being would be if somehow you accidentally focused at either the minimum focusing distance or infinity.

+1

slaughtered it!

 

[fmw]

Probably motion blur. Did you shoot at 1/80 hand held? As a pro, I would use a camera support with a 1/80 shutter speed. Why not experiment. Go shoot the shot again. Take a tripod and also try some hand held shots at wider apertures and higher shutter speeds?

 

[MK3Brent]

Probably motion blur. Did you shoot at 1/80 hand held? As a pro, I would use a camera support with a 1/80 shutter speed. Why not experiment. Go shoot the shot again. Take a tripod and also try some hand held shots at wider apertures and higher shutter speeds?

Real problem solving skills.
Take this comment to heart. Go back and try to recreate your results so you know what does what.

 

[fjrabon]

Probably motion blur. Did you shoot at 1/80 hand held? As a pro, I would use a camera support with a 1/80 shutter speed. Why not experiment. Go shoot the shot again. Take a tripod and also try some hand held shots at wider apertures and higher shutter speeds?

Unless he's literally tossing the camera up in the air and letting it fall to do the ground, at 22mm, its not going to be from camera shake with 1/80 shutter speed. Not THAT much blurriness. And while perhaps the wind causing the leaves to blow could have been the issue in theory, if you look at the picture at full resolution up close, everything, including the tree trunk is soft, so it's probably not motion blur either.