Photography

[Hartmann]

I take pictures whenever I can and usually have a camera within reach at all times. I am by no means a professional but do enjoy trying new techniques.

[chaselikesmacs]

Hey I just started a photoblog that I *hope* to be updating regularly.

Chasey Photography

feel free to check it out

[Yuiichi]

Very cool Chasey, I hope to see a lot of great photos on there.

For you photo gurus, I have a little bit of a question/delimma. As you know, I'm a little into amateur photography myself, but I have a problem. All of the pictures you guys have posted have been amazingly clear and gorgeous, but my camera can't seem to take a picture without being blurry or unclear at some points. I don't know whether my camera and I are not just a good match, but I've tried everything to make my hands as steady as possible. Even with the flash on (for low light), I still get blurry photos.

My question to you is: is there anything else I can do to make my photos clearer? Might there be some sort of setting to make the photos better?

My camera is a Nikon E5600, just in case you wanted to know.

Thanks for your help!

[divigation]

General rule for hand holding and maintaining sharp focus is that your shutter speed should be no slower than the reciprocal of your lens length, so if you are shooting with a 500mm lens, you will need to shoot everything at 1/1000 of a second or faster, with a 50mm lens you should not shoot slower than 1/60. This is a good rule as even the most experienced photographers can't go far beyond this with success. Of course, I don't know how much this helps as you are shooting with a point & shoot. Of course this could be overcome through camera stabilization with a tripod (or a monopod for a more on-the-go solution). I believe that the 5600 has Blur warning doesn't it? Not sure how much it would help as I haven't used such a feature, but it might help you be on the look out. But you can look at the metadata of your blurry images and analyze the exposure information to see if it is a matter of your shutter speeds being too slow, at least you will have a better idea of precisely what the problem is.

[Yuiichi]

Thanks for the information Divigation.

The 5600 does have a blur warning, but it's only for extreme blur. If you take a look at my flickr here, you'll see that all of my photos are not nearly as clear as other photos that have been posted.

I'll take a look at the metadata as soon as I get access to some of my photos, and perhaps we can go from there.

EDIT: Here is the metadata from one of my photos, I can't decipher it myself unfortunately. Maybe one of you gets it.

[baseballboy828]

First:

Tag::Nikon Type 3::0x00AC: VR-OFF

You should probably turn VR (Shake Compensation) on to start. Do you know if the camera has optical stabilization, or digital/?

[Yuiichi]

Thanks for the reply baseballboy.

From this site, it seems that the Coolpix 5600 doesn't have image stabilization. Maybe you're looking for something else on that sheet? It should tell you all you need to know about the camera though.

Thanks for the continued help!

[Naptownman]

I couldn't get a very sharp photo from the three or four consumer pocket digital cameras either unless I used the sharpen adjustment in photo software or the unsharp mask control in Photoshop. A couple camers had menu settings to adjust the sharpness of the photo in the camera. Some just made the pics look artificial. It wasn't until I got a Nikon D40 a couple months ago (a digital slr) that I realized the difference hardware would make.

Experiment with some post processing of the images. With sharpness adjustments a little goes a long way. Too much makes pictures worse in that the algorithms used to find areas to sharpen actually begin to find the pixel edges themselves and that's not good.

[baseballboy828]

You don't know what you're missing until you try an SLR. And, with an SLR, you don't know what you're missing until you try a large format camera. But those are so insanely expensive for digital models, that it's not something you can just give a try to see if you like it.

[Yuiichi]

Disregarding other hardware, is there anything other than buying a tripod that can make my images any sharper? Haha, I would really like to improve my technique as well, so are there any hints/tips that you can give me/point me to a book?