BetterPhoto Q&A
Category: To Be Categorized

How to Remedy

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January 12, 2001

1) Is there anything sharp in the photo? If so, you simply had the AF sensor pointed at the wrong place when you locked the focusing (Usually when the timer starts)

2) Is all of the person unsharp? If not what is unsharp? If it's a movable body part, perhaps they were moving at the time, and your shutter speed was too slow.

3) Is any of the body sharp? If so, you may have had your aperture open too wide and depth of field was too shallow. One of my favourite informal couple poses is girl in front, guy hugging her from behind, both facing the camera. (Especially good when guy is at least 10cm taller) My first roll with my 200 f/2.8 had such short depth of field that her nose was sharp, her eyes were soft, and he was already blurry.

4) Finally, was the aperture wide open, or were you at either extreme range of the lens? Cheaper lenses that get bundled often are poorly grounded and have plastic elements in them. This means that their "sweet spot" tends to be 2 - 3 stops smaller than maximum, and somewhere around the short - middle end of the lens. Anything else renders consistently unsharp photos.

Flash is usually daylight balanced. Was this photo indoors? If so, what usually happens is that you held the shutter long enough past the flash that ambient light got in and gave it that colour cast. Yellow light often represents tungsten lighting (ordinary every day globes). That would explain slight unsharpness too, if you held it open that long.

Good luck with your happy snapping! It's a journey of years to get the technical part of photography down, and a journey of a lifetime to capture the photos that are uniquely you.

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January 12, 2001