How to Take Sharp Images

Episode 191 - Four things that will cause your images to be out of focus.

The Transcript page - https://photographysidehustle.com/191

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Transcript

Hey, how's it going? I'm Andy Jones, and this is episode 191  of the photography sidehustle podcast.  So this podcast episode is a day late. It was a little bit ill yesterday. Anna and myself have come down with some weird kind of cold. She's got it a lot worse than me. So if you hear some really heavy breathing in this, you'll know why.

I'm feeling a lot better today. So. I'm pretty confident we can get this one done.  One other thing I want to mention. I've been messing around trying to get this Lightroom course ready, and it's been stressing me out as well as doing other stuff. And I've decided I'm going to do these small videos at a much lesser price.

So, the first one I'm going to put out is going to be how to do a simple edit, there's going to be two or three videos, maybe there I'll do a simple edit and a more complex edit. I'll package them all together for a lower price, much lower price than I was selling the Photoshop course for. And then I think I will break up the Photoshop course into the things that you really need.

You don't need an in depth A to Z or A to Z. You just need to get information on how to do things quickly. So I'm going to do them as smaller mini courses and, like I say, a lot less cost. Alright, so that'll be coming in the next couple of weeks. This episode is how to take sharp images. So the things that are going to stop you from taking sharp images are number one is camera shake  and camera shake can be caused by many, many things. 

I see people taking photos using their LCD screen as the viewfinder and the holding the camera at arm's length.  Yeah, it's cool to do, but you're going to get a lot more blurry images because your hands are away from your body. If you use the viewfinder, you need to tuck your elbows into your body and make sure that that camera does not move.

So I always get my left elbow into my ribs.  Which is not easy when you're fat, I'll be honest with you. It's not easy, but I do manage it. I bruise myself a little. Anyway, my left elbow in, I hold in the lens and that does not move. It doesn't move at all. And my right hand has free range to do whatever it needs to do, like changing settings and taking the photo.

And when I take the photo, it does not move. Okay. The other thing you've got to look at if you are getting camera shake is finger pressure. When you're taking the photo, when you push the shutter button down, if you do it in a jerky way, believe it or not, you will cause the camera to move slightly. Just try it yourself.

Just see if you hold the camera in your normal position, but just pull your head back just a little bit. Depress the shutter the way you normally do, and you'll see a little bit of movement in the camera. It'll just tweak it a little bit. It has to be depressed very smoothly, and not causing any pressure on the camera.

You'll find that a lot of landscape photographers Even on a tripod, they will use a two second delay on their shutter button. And when you push the button, you take your hands away from the camera, but only take your hands away from the camera if it is on a tripod. If you're holding it, do not let go of it.

So you push it, and it, the camera will count to two and take a picture. And that takes any movement away. It allows the camera to settle. Even when you push the button, it moved it slightly. It will steady itself and take an image. So that is camera shake. Number two is shutter speed is too slow. So if your shutter speed is too slow, you will get blurry images.

A slow shutter speed of, say, a 60th of a second isn't suitable for taking a picture of one of your kids running around the garden. You will probably need something like One two fiftieth of a second or three twenty or five hundredth of a second. The faster the subject moves, the faster the shutter speed has to be to freeze any motion. 

A kid running around the yard, you do say two fiftieth of a second. If it was a car on a racetrack or a motorcycle on a racetrack going fast, you'd be looking at one thousand or two thousand or as fast as you need. And the only way to know how fast you need it really is to take an image, look at it. If it's the slightest bit blurry, you need a faster shutter speed. 

Number three  is focus point. By focus point, I mean where on someone's body you focus.  So I see an awful lot of beginner portraits where, say, the person is having their image taken and they've got their hands in front of them. Just maybe their arms are crossed and the hands are in sharp, sharp focus, but their face, their eyes look a little bit, not quite in focus.

And that is because the focus point was on the hands. And that is why that part is in focus and the eyes aren't. When you're taking someone's portrait, the focus point is always on one of the eyes. So if you've got one of these new cameras with the eye detection. It will automatically find the eye and you can compose the image.

If you have a slightly older one that doesn't have that eye detection. There's two ways of doing it, you can either learn how to use the different focus points on the screen. So when you look through your viewfinder, you'll see all those little either circles or squares or crosses. Depends on what model you've got and each one of those is a focus point.

There's a dial or a joystick kind of thing on the back of the camera. You can flick through all the different focus points. So you can compose your image and use a different focus point and make sure that that focus point is on the person's eye and you will get a perfect portrait. The other way of doing it is using something called back button focus. 

With back button focus you use the central focus point  and you aim it at the person's eye with the back button depressed and that keeps it focused. Once the camera focuses, you can take your thumb off as long as you don't move or the subject doesn't move, you can then recompose the image and take the photograph with your index finger on the regular shutter button.

If though, that person moves backwards, forwards,  the focus distance will change and that's no good. Now to get around that, if they are moving a little bit, you just keep your thumb on the back button and take your Image by pushing the shutter button down with your index finger, and you will get perfect pictures every time.

Now, I'm not going to go into how you set those up. There's no real need. You can just look in your camera manual. If you don't have a camera manual, you can go over to PhotographySideHustle.  com and I've got a page set up there with links to Sony, well Sony, Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, Minolta, every one of them is on there.

And all the manuals are available for download as a PDF file.  The fourth and final thing that will cause your photos to be out of focus is not having the correct depth of field. Now,  I'll try and explain what depth of field is. So, when you focus on someone's eye, and you've got an f2.8 lens, say, a nice wide lens, The depth of field might only be eight inches, and you'll get roughly four inches in front of the eye and four inches behind the eye that are in focus.

So when you get to, say, two feet behind the eye, or even a meter behind the person's eye, going back into this scene, everything is going to start getting very, very blurry and out of focus. And that is an effect that most people want when they're doing a portrait. Now, If your depth of field is too shallow, say you've got the same settings, the same distance from the subject, but there is another person standing behind them.

Say they're just two feet behind them, and the depth of field is only four inches behind the person's eye, which is basically to the back of their head. The person behind won't be in focus. You need a bigger depth of field and you create the bigger depth of field by using different  So you would use like F4, F5.6, instead of giving you four inches in front and four inches behind the front person's eye, it'll give you something like 12 inches. These are just guesses you've got to work out yourself with your calculator and you'll get used to it. And the, the best way of doing it, you take a photo, look at it and zoom in and you'll see whether it's in focus or not. 

That is one I see all the time. The wrong depth of field, meaning it's too shallow, it's not got enough depth of field to get every, everything in focus. If you're not sure how to figure out a depth of field, there are things on the internet and apps for your phone called depth of field calculators, D O F calculators, and you put in how far you are from the subject, what camera you're using, whether it's full frame or it's a crop sensor camera.

Photo pills, which you have to pay for. I think it's 11 or something like that. So you put in the distance from the subjects,  the type of camera you're using, whether it's crop or full frame  and the focal length of the lens, 50 millimeters, 35, you put that in  the aperture you're using. So if you're using 2.8. You put in, you pick F2.8 , and it will tell you how much,  how big the depth of field is. It'll give you the complete depth of field, which might be, like I said before,  as an example, 8 inches. And it'll be roughly 4 inches in front. Four inches behind the focus point. Generally the depth of field in front of the focus point is smaller than, slightly smaller than the one behind it.

Just get yourself one of these depth of field calculators. I found one the other day on, I have a Android phone, and there's a good free one on there just called depth of field calculator. Do a search for free depth of field calculator and you'll get all the free ones. Photo pills probably won't show up, which is still a, it's for the money.

You pay once and you've got it for life and you can just have it on your phone. When you get a new lens, go through different ideas with it. Just put in like 10 feet away from the subject with your F4 lens say, and what kind of camera you've got and just see what the depth of field is going to be. It's really neat to play with depth of field, but you need to understand it to get everything right from the beginning. 

Okay, that's all I've got for this week. I'll be back next week with another one. I'll try and make sure I do it on Sunday. Hopefully I won't get sick again. I will try and get one of these smaller courses out by next weekend. Now I know my promises are pretty rubbish because something always happens. So I'm going to try for next week and if not the middle of next week, and it'll be a basic Lightroom edit and then a full Lightroom edit.

I'll package them both together. So you've got a starting point and then you can move on.  Okay. I'll be back next week with a lens cap full of waffle. Talk to you soon. Bye.