Very Very Very new, newbie

[Glenn NK]

Donald, I am wondering that if Ash was shooting a cropped sensor that the lack of sharpness may due to a to slow shutter speed since if he was shooting a full zoom with a cropped sensor his minimum shutter speed would need to be around 1/300.
Bruce

For a given lens focal length, a crop sensor simply captures a smaller part of the incoming image than a larger sensor would (in effect it crops the image before it's captured rather than after it). A smaller sensor doesn't change the focal length of the lens.

If for example, the body simply and only translated parallel to the sensor plane by an amount of 0.001 inch (one thousandths of an inch = 0.0254 mm), then all objects would have a blur of 0.001 inch.

What is more important is rotation of the camera body through a small angle (vertical, horizontal or oblique angle). In this case, the farther the object is from the sensor, the more the rotation will translate into apparent lateral, vertical or oblique movement. For example, an object an arm's length from the camera might not show any blur from the camera's rotation, but something at a 200 metres could conceivably be blurred by inches/centimeters.

Simple experiment: focus your camera on something 24 inches/600mm away and slightly rotate the camera in your hands - observe the apparent movement in the VF. Now focus on something 20ft/6m away and rotate the camera the same amount - observe how much more the image moved in the frame. Far objects will be more blurred than close ones from camera rotation.

The problem that arises with longer lenses is that one is focusing and framing on something much farther away, so that camera body rotation has more effect than at very short distances. So really, it would seem that it matters not what the focal length is, but how important faraway features are in the image. If the BG in a landscape is a bit blurred, it's forgiven, but if it's an eagle on a nest the same amount of blur caused by camera rotation destroys the image.

To me it seems it isn't a matter of the focal length that determines the shutter speed, it's how far away the important subject is located from the camera. Long lenses are usually used for subjects far from the camera so we need a higher shutter speed, but it's not the focal length per se that causes the problem.

Any comments?

[Iceash]

Ash,

Looking at the landscape image I'll offer the following;

At this small resolution (picture size on the screen) it's a bit difficult to diagnose the problem exactly. The first thing I note is that the house windows and the horizontal overhead wire (left side 3/4 up) look sharp whereas the foreground is not.

The cranes in the background at 14 miles away, taken with a zoom on max and accounting for haze may simply be what you would expect.

My question would be what did you focus on, how far away was it and would f11 give you a DoF that would cause the OOF area in the foreground as would be expected?

Grahame

Hi,

I focused on the cranes maybe a tad far?

[Iceash]

How do I upload a full size pic?

[jcuknz]

I am suprised that nobody has suggested atmospheric haze for the cranes being soft ... the whole picture is on the soft dull side and a loose selection around the cranes brings them up with sharpening.


When you organise a selection whatever you do is applied only to the selection and not the rest of the picture.
Adjustment with curves brightened the whole up leaving just the cranes needing sharpening. Did you use AF or manual focus, either way I think you may have thought you focused on the cranes but actually on the house etc.

[jcuknz]

When you want to show the full image without resizing the idea is to make an 800x600pixel or 900x600 as you have a DSLR crop out of a pertinent area of the picture and post that. Some can do that I don't try

[Iceash]

When you want to show the full image without resizing the idea is to make an 800x600pixel or 900x600 as you have a DSLR crop out of a pertinent area of the picture and post that. Some can do that I don't try

Well I had success with taking so new photos. A lot closer and a lot sharper! Very pleased now :-)

[RustBeltRaw]

To my eye, the cranes appeared to be the sharpest part of the original photo. I suspect Ash focused at infinity, which is a reasonable conclusion, but doesn't take full advantage of the available depth of field. Focusing short of infinity can help get an entire scene in focus. See this CiC tutorial on hyperfocal distance for a good primer.

Note also that lower-end telephoto zooms tend to lose a lot of contrast at maximum zoom. That loss is the reason I haven't bothered buying any of the 75-300mm variable-aperture zooms, even though I've borrowed several. Their performance is consistently disappointing (to me, at least).

[Iceash]

Hi All,

I swapped to my smaller lens today and didn't use any zoom anyway here are is a shot I particularly like in terms of sharpness.

My Version.
http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e3...psa89bbf58.jpg

Camera Jpeg Version
http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e3...ps42c1502a.jpg

Not too bad I think?

[skilsaw]

It was a distance of around 14miles from me to the Cranes.

Your distance of 14 miles with a 200mm lens seems incorrect.
Did you mean 1.4 miles? Maybe 2 or 3 miles? No science here. Just how skyscrapers look in the distance.

Sorry, I have no advice on your fuzzy daylight landscape.

[Colin Southern]

I do have to wonder if folks here are not seeing the forest because of all the trees?

In short, any photo is going to appear somewhat unsharp unless it's been sharpened! (including capture sharpening, content/creative sharpening, and output sharpening).

Ash, in summary, start by going through a couple of threads we've had in the past:

When/How to Best Sharpen a Digital Photograph

Sharpening and Noise Reduction Sequence

And when posting, it's great if you can aim for an image that's around 1200px wide (for a horizontal) or somewhere around 900px high (for a vertical); anything smaller and it's just too small on modern typical (1920 x 1080 px) monitors. If you're using TinyPic to host the images then you can go up to 1599px (which means people will need to click on them to see them at that size, but other than that it's worth it). Posting full res images is generally a waste of time because no monitor can display them at 100% size - so the browser will down-sample them for display - which will introduce softening.

[Colin Southern]

I took the liberty of downloading the landscape and opening it RawTherapee (RT). There appears to be a lack of contrast perhaps due to loss of dynamic range from using ISO400.

Um, no.

It's largely a reflective scene (thus around 4 stops DR required) and at ISO 400 a Nikon D3200 would have a DR of around 11 stops.

[Colin Southern]

PS: Results after some basic sharpening of the original along with minor levels adjustments.

(Click for correct size view)

[xpatUSA]

Originally Posted by xpatUSA I took the liberty of downloading the landscape and opening it RawTherapee (RT). There appears to be a lack of contrast perhaps due to loss of dynamic range from using ISO400.

Um, no.

Um, sorry

It's largely a reflective scene (thus around 4 stops DR required) and at ISO 400 a Nikon D3200 would have a DR of around 11 stops.

You're right, Colin, image DR was indeed about 3-1/2 stops.

But also wrong, a Nikon D3200 DR in 'standard' is around 9 stops and only around 8 stops in 'landscape', according to tests here:

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikon-d3200/14

cheers,

[Iceash]

Thanks for you're comments. The adjustments you achieved were very effective. :-)

[Colin Southern]

Shame?!

Ash, I live in rural Texas, 8 miles from the nearest town, no land-line, no DSL. 200 KB/sec is as fast as it gets on Verizon 4G LTE (cellular) and my Hughes satellite connection can go down to 3KB/sec. I pay about $140/month for those fine services. No doubt things are different over there in Essex, but it does appear to me that you're recommending Tera-bit bandwidth and mega-bit/sec internet connections so we can download huge JPEGS, etc, in the blink of an eye?

My comment was not personal and it stands, notwithstanding my shame. Please don't take offense, none was intended, and no need to thank me for spending almost an hour downloading and analyzing your images and concocting my best opinion and advice.

cheers,

Ted,

I'm at somewhat of a loss to understand your position on this; Ash posted a link to a very reasonably sized image -- and if one wanted a larger size then one had to make a conscious choice to navigate to that. So it seems to me that on one hand you took the conscious decision to download the original -- and the next minute you're complaining about it's size.

The solution seems very simple to me; if you don't want to download a large file, don't ferret out and click on it's link -- it wasn't as if Ash posted a link directly to it here (in fact, being a bit slow to catch on sometimes, I had to search for a couple of minutes to even find the link on Photobucket) (so I could edit the image as posted above).

[Colin Southern]

But also wrong, a Nikon D3200 DR in 'standard' is around 9 stops and only around 8 stops in 'landscape', according to tests here:

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikon-d3200/14

cheers,

And according to the industry-standard benchmarks, spot on 11, as previously posted:

http://www.dxomark.com/Cameras/Nikon...--Measurements



Checkmate!

[Iceash]

And according to the industry-standard benchmarks, spot on 11, as previously posted:

http://www.dxomark.com/Cameras/Nikon...--Measurements



Checkmate!

What does this mean?

[xpatUSA]

And according to the industry-standard benchmarks, spot on 11, as previously posted:

http://www.dxomark.com/Cameras/Nikon...--Measurements
Checkmate!

How about stalemate, Colin? Obviously, different criteria and methods used and I don't visit DXOmark at all.

However, you provided no reference for your earlier statement, so what are we to think?

cheers,

[Iceash]

Sure, no hard feelings!

So ted, what's your typical shot you go for?

[Colin Southern]

How about stalemate, Colin? Obviously, different criteria and methods used and I don't visit DXOmark at all.

Um, well no, not really - DxO are pretty much the industry standard for testing all makes and models; they're absolute titans of camera/lens performance. Have a look around their site -- I think you'll realise that pretty quickly.

However, you provided no reference for your earlier statement, so what are we to think?

I make a million statements a day - you'd have to give me a bit of a hint before I know which one you're referring to.