Tell us about your camera and how you use it. What’s the one thing you like the most about your camera? Are you using a cameraphone? They are great for shooting when you come across an unexpected spectacular moment. Some of the excellent moments have been captured on cameraphones. Or are you using a DSLR?
If you are still making up your mind to buy one, you can check out the quick buying guide here. Tell us what you’d like to know more about your camera. We are coming up with some great posts for the camera owners so have your say before we start.
We have been covering a lot of basic and technical topics on the photography front in the last one month. We’d like to know you better and collect your suggestions. We want to make sure we know you and your camera so that the information is relevant, is usable and valuable. So what are you waiting for? Come on say something :)
Hi Arafath, welcome to the wonderful photography.
First off I would suggest you investigate your local high schools for night classes on photography. You can learn a wealth of information from these sorts of classes as well as interact with other keen photographers at a similar stage.
OK, so your images are not as sharp as you hope or expect. Matt Matchura raised an excellent point about the apature of the lens. Lenses tend to have a ‘Sweet Spot” where the lens is at its optimum, this is usually around f8 – f11. This is where most lenses will produce their best result.
HOWEVER digital cameras, including SLRs will not create a sharp image. The cameras will try to apply some average sharpening of the image, but not always the best. If you want to get better results use Photoshop, (or whatever you’re using) and apply “Unsharp”. Ironically this will sharpen the image. Do not just whack it up to full or you will over sharpen the image and distort the result.
There are other basic things you can do to clean up the image with out chopping it up. I wont go in to these here. Night classes can help you here and so can various articles on this site and many others.
Big suggestion – some people take a view of, ‘Who cares, I’ll fix it later in photoshop”. Not a great attitude to develop. There is only so much you can fix with a poor photo.
Try and get the best image you can when you take it. This will improve you skills with photography and increase your chance of getting great images.
An extra 5 min taking a shot can save hours of agony behind the keyboard and an uncertain result.
Good luck and good shooting,
Paul P
Great suggestions. Additionally I wanted to mention that digital cameras are not as sharp as film cameras. One reason is Bayer Interpolation. Use the in-camera sharpening set to moderate or auto (turning it off may be fine if you are shooting RAW and want to process the capture sharpening later). There’s no workaround for sharpening photos during post-processing (with certain exceptions).
Additionally, it could be otherwise and there’s some fault in the equipment itself, so do compare your lens/camera with others of the same make before concluding anything.