You don’t need to see every strand on every feather in a bird photo to make it a nice shot (see the sample detail from this photo in the image below). In fact I would say that other factors are much more important in photography. But at least it’s nice to be able to get things sharp when you want it. The bird is a Welcome Swallow.

Equipment

This is the first thing people think of, but it’s usually not the culprit. Most camera gear these days works like it should. That’s not to say quality control is always perfect. I’ve experienced the frustrations of a camera that focused unreliably. In my case, the problems were fixed by a firmware update and it’s been working really well ever since.

So I don’t want to suggest that equipment is never to blame. But I do want to say that in the vast majority of cases a soft photo is the result of one or more of the things I describe below.

Dirty lens

I’ll get this one out of the way now because it’s the simplest to diagnose and the easiest to fix. It’s why I always pack a lens cleaning kit when I go on holidays.

Fast-moving, nervous small birds darting about in poor light, like this Silvereye, can represent a real challenge for photographers. Yet it’s even possible to consistently get tack-sharp photos of these reluctant subjects if you understand the potential problems and how to work around them. See the sample below for an indication of some of the detail in this shot.

Camera shake

In a perfect world our hands would be as steady as tripods. But they’re not. Which is why we invented tripods. To state the bleeding obvious, you don’t want to be jiggling the camera when you’re firing the shutter. An awful lot of soft shots are in fact the result of camera shake, especially when your’re working at maximum zoom (a long lens).

When I take a shot I go to great pains to keep things still. I hold my camera close to my body, often with my elbows leaning on my chest, and I sort of hold my breath as I squeeze the shutter button. If there’s something solid I can lean against then that’s even better. Otherwise I stand with my feet apart and my knees slightly bent, to make myself more stable.

Kneeling down and using your elbow on one knee like a sort of tripod is another way you can minimise camera movement. Using a tripod, a monopod, or resting your camera in a small bean bag will obviously help too. Otherwise, you can look for something solid to sit your camera on.

Then there’s the shutter button — the one you press to take a shot. You should never jab it or tap it like you would a key on a keyboard. Instead you should squeeze it, or roll your finger onto it. Jabbing that button is going to cause vibration in the camera that will almost guarantee a blurred shot.

Image stabilization allows for hand-held photography at slower shutter speeds.

Image Stabilization

Different lens manufacturers have different names for it, but they’re all taking about pretty much the same thing. I’m referring to what Canon calls Image Stabilization, Nikon calls Vibration Reduction, Sigma calls Optical Stabilization and what I call Really Good. What it does is reduce the blur caused by the camera shake that comes from our unsteady hands. And it works. If your lens has that feature then it can help. For example, looking through my 400 mm lens without Image Stabilization turned on is like watching footage of an earthquake. Turn on Image Stabilization and the buildings stop shaking, resulting in photos with less blur.

So Image Stabilization (or whatever you call it) will definitely help with camera shake but remember that it won’t have any effect on the kind of motion blur you get if it’s your subject that’s doing the moving. Because then you could end up with a nice sharp landscape around a blurred subject.

If your lens does use Image Stabilisation then it can be worth the effort to read the information about it in your lens manual. That’s because it often needs different settings for things like panning or when using a tripod.

Oh yeah, and one more thing about Image Stabilisation, and don’t laugh because it’s caught me out more than once: Don’t forget to turn it on.

A long telephoto lens can bring you ‘closer’ to small wildlife like this Restless Flycatcher, but it also brings a need to be much more vigilant against camera shake.

Telephoto lenses

If you look through a weak pair of binoculars you might not notice much shaking. But look through a very powerful telescope and it becomes almost impossible to see anything clearly through all the shaking unless it’s mounted on a sturdy base.

It’s like that with cameras. The longer your focal length, the more you will notice camera shake.

So here’s a rough rule to keep in mind when you’re working hand-held: use your focal length number as a minimum shutter speed number. In other words, if you’re using a 250mm lens and are working hand-held then you should have a minimum shutter speed of 250th second. 400mm lens at 400th second. And so on.

So that’s going to help reduce blur from camera shake, and those higher shutter speeds are also going to help reduce blur from your subject moving, but pushing shutter speeds higher can also sometimes lead to blurred images! I’ll explain how:

Using a fast shutter speed tends not to be a problem in bright light, but in dim light it requires either a big aperture or a high ISO setting (or both) in order to get a decent exposure.

Some lenses are not at their sharpest when used at their biggest aperture, and as well as that, the big aperture is going to reduce your depth of field, which is going to reduce the amount of your scene in focus.

And as for the high ISO, well, many cameras produce a lot of pixel noise when they work at a high ISO setting.

And so once again the result is a blurred shot. This is a very common cause of a loss of image quality and accounts for a lot of the soft images I’ve seen taken with a long lens where those high shutter speeds are needed to stop camera shake blur.

What can you do about it? Well, you’re just going to have to find a way to get more light into your camera. That might mean using a flash powerful enough to reach your telephoto’s subject, or it might mean mounting your rig onto a tripod and using a slower exposure. And then hope your subject doesn’t move too quickly for your slow shutter speed.

Of course, in bright light you’re not likely to run into this problem.

Incorrect use of a tripod

I once heard it said that there were two types of tripods: the ones that are easy to carry, and the good ones.

For years my tripod was the easy-to-carry type. So it was easy to take with me. But it was usually so useless that I might as well have left it at home.

Because it was lightweight it lacked the sturdy construction required to keep my camera still in any breeze strong enough to feel on my face. And in a decent blow I could hold the camera more steady in my hands.

So, if you use a tripod it’s worth having a good one. You can think of it as an investment because our tripods tend to last much longer than our cameras.

Extending the tripod’s legs

Here’s something you might not have realised: as you gradually extend the legs of your tripod you should always use the top extensions first. Why is that? Because the top extensions are thicker than the lower leg extensions. And thicker legs means a more stable tripod. Ideally, the lower, thinner, leg extensions should only be used in calm conditions. So if it’s windy, then think about not extending your tripod all the way.

Old (left) and modern (right) versions of a cable release.

Cable release

Even if you’re using a tripod, you can still get camera shake. For example there’s the camera shake that comes from a strong wind. Don’t underestimate that. I was once taking photographs in some mountains while using a tripod, and when I turned around a gust of wind picked up the entire camera and tripod and blew them 30 feet away. If that’s not camera shake then I don’t know what is. But of course what I was leading to in this section is the way you press your shutter button. Even a careful squeeze of your shutter button can be enough to cause the kind of camera movement that’s noticeable if you’re using a long lens. If you really, really need to keep the camera still then you should think about using a cable release.

A cable release is a cord with a button on the end. You connect one end to your camera and the other end with the button goes in your hand. When you press the button, the vibrations don’t make it all the way down the cable and so the camera doesn’t shake.

If you don’t have a cable release and you want to avoid camera shake, then think about using a delayed exposure. For example, if your camera fires 10 seconds after you pressed the shutter button, then it would have had plenty of time to stop vibrating.

The shutter speed for this photo of a swooping Masked Lapwing was 800th second. I could have perhaps gone a bit faster but the light wasn’t all that strong. Also, I was happy to allow a little bit of motion blur around the wings to emphasise the sense of movement.

A Water Dragon turns its head. I admit this is an extreme example of this type of motion blur but I include it for two reasons — one: because head movements in animals result in an awful lot of blurred shots, and two: because I thought it was kind of funny.

Moving subject

Even if your camera is on a rock-solid tripod, that’s not going to stop motion blur from happening if your subject is moving. For example, a car driving past you at 60 kph will travel about 27cm during a 60th second exposure. That’s almost a foot in the imperial language.

If you’re not panning to follow the car’s progress than that foot of movement will make an awful lot of motion blur in your photo. If you can’t slow down your car (or pan) then you’re going to have to speed up your camera. If you really want to freeze the action of a car going past then I would suggest going as fast as your camera can manage in the available light. Because even at 1000th second, that car will still have moved about one and a half centimetres, which is enough to cause some motion blur.

So that’s the story with moving cars. But what about wildlife? For critters like birds, which tend to be constantly twitching, preening, jerking their heads around and so on, I would encourage nothing slower than 250th second, and preferably much faster than that if there’s sufficient light. Most of my bird shots are taken at shutter speeds between 640th second and 2,000th second, depending on how strong the light is and how much blur I want in my shot (sometimes a little bit of motion blur can make a shot look better in my opinion, but that’s a very subjective thing.)

Depth of Field, or perhaps I should say, not enough Depth of Field, can be a big problem when photographing very small creatures. I wanted the entire face of this jumping spider to be in focus, so I took a series of shots focusing at different depths and merged them all into the one shot in a process called stacking.

Depth of field

Depth of Field is the amount of distance between the closest and most far-away things in focus. You control it with your aperture setting. If you have your aperture set wide open then a lot of stuff is going to be out of focus. That could be exactly the result you want because you might want to only have your subject looking sharp. But sometimes, for example with a group shot of friends, you don’t want half the people to be out of focus. If depth of field is your problem, then remember that choosing a bigger aperture number will give you a bigger Depth of Field. But don’t push that aperture too far. Really high aperture numbers, like f/32 for example, cause problems of their own. Also, as a general rule, Depth of Field issues will not be so noticeable at shorter focal lengths.

I talk more about Depth of Field on this page and you can read that to fill in some gaps about how cameras work and Depth of Field, but now I want to talk about another thing that I was leading to in the previous paragraph.

Lens too closed

Even though some of my lenses will allow me to choose apertures as tiny as f/32, I personally don’t like using anything smaller than f/16. And even that setting is something I only use when I really need a lot of Depth of Field.

You see, at those really small apertures, some unpleasant physics start taking place with the way light works. To cut a long story short: very small apertures lead to diffraction, and diffraction can cause the whole image to lose sharpness.

So if you’ve been setting your camera at f/32 then you might want to bring it back down to f/16 or f/8 and chances are that, despite some loss of Depth of Field, the bits in focus should look better.

Lens too open

Okay, so now we know you don’t want your lens closed down too much into a tiny aperture. But sometimes you suffer some loss of sharpness from having your lens wide open (big aperture) too.

Different lenses perform differently and so there is no hard and fast rule here, but quite a few lenses lose a little bit of sharpness if they are used at their biggest possible aperture. In those circumstances, stopping down your lens to a slightly smaller aperture can help.

Zoom lenses

Just like some lenses lose a bit of sharpness when you stop down their aperture too much, some zoom lenses lose a bit of sharpness when you zoom in to the maximum focal length. It might not seem all that noticeable but the effect can be a slight problem if you combine that with using the biggest possible aperture. I have a lens like that.

If I use that lens fully extended (maximum zoom) and also wide open (biggest aperture), then I can see a slight loss of sharpness in my shots. Combine that with very low light and the resulting high ISO and I’m just asking for a soft (slightly blurred) shot. This is why some photographers pay a lot of money for the best possible lenses, because the best lenses tend to capture more light and behave better in these areas than the cheap ones.

Corner sharpness

Some lenses can cause a slight loss of sharpness around the corners, with the clearest detail showing up in the centre of the frame. Various lenses perform differently and the effect is also usually only slight. But I include it because I promised to mention a lot of causes for soft images.

This Brush Turkey chick was constantly moving on the floor of a dark rainforest. Getting a sharp image without the use of a flash can be difficult under those circumstances.

Low light

When I talk about low light, I don’t mean light coming from a low angle. I mean that the light is not strong. Now, maybe I’m repeating myself here, but I’ll include this section for those people who might have inadvertently missed, in the previous sections, how working in low light can lead to all sorts of problems with image sharpness.

In low light your camera is going to want to try any of a bunch of tricks in an attempt to get the right exposure. So, any of the following things can happen:

• It pushes up its ISO a long way (resulting in a noisy image with a loss of fine detail).
• Slows down your shutter speed (resulting in motion blur and camera shake blur)
• Opens up your aperture so much that you lose depth of field, or perhaps the lens is not as sharp as normal when it’s set at its maximum aperture.

You would be surprised how many people think their camera or lens might be causing blurred images when the real problem was that they were working in low light and failed to modify the way they worked. Perhaps they should have used a flash or a tripod.

Noise

I’ve already mentioned noise a few times here, and have dedicated a whole article about it here. Let’s just say that noise can contribute to a blurred appearance in your photos and the usual fix way to prevent that noise is to somehow get more light into your shot (providing that doesn’t mean you break some of the rules mentioned above, like for example, resorting to too slow a shutter speed).

So you’ll realise by now that a lot of things can contribute to the blurring of photos. And combining multiple causes just compounds the problem. So if your shots aren’t as sharp as you want them to be, then maybe one or more of the causes mentioned above could be the cause.

Beginners’ series on digital SLR photography

 

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