Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
One of the major benefits of mirrorless cameras is improved autofocus. 100% coverage and 5000 autofocus points. So, are all images you make will the 100% sharp 100% of the time? I’m afraid not. No matter how good autofocus gets, there will always be times when you take a portrait and can’t get both eyes to be sharp. Is the autofocus at fault? No, the photographer is.[Read More…]
While teaching a recent workshop I joked that street photography was the only genre where people would buy £3k worth of cameras and lenses and then deliberately use them to make out of focus, grainy, imperfect images. This led to a pretty interesting discussion about the merits to imperfection, and I think some of those points are worth sharing here, as it really helped contextualise some of the students ideas about their work, and allowed them to shoot a little more freely, chasing down perfection in moments rather than technicalities.
There have been a few reports across Facebook groups, YouTube videos, and various forums across the web on sharpness issues with DJI’s new Mavic 2 Pro. Despite housing a camera branding the Hasselblad name, people aren’t happy. But are things really as bad as they might appear?
Tom David from Tom’s Tech Time puts the new Mavic 2 Pro head to head against the Phantom 4 Pro to see how the two compare. Surely the new Mavic 2 Pro with a Hasselblad camera should beat the pants off the two-and-a-half-year-old Phantom 4 Pro, right? You’d think so.
Picture this: you come home after a great day out photographing and you’re excited to look through all the beautiful images you’ve captured. However, after importing them you realize that they’re all garbage because they’re blurry.
I’m sure you’ve experienced that, as have the majority of us. Personally, I’ve had to throw away several promising images due to them not being sharp.
In a perfect world, you’d come home after every session with 100% of the images being tack sharp but unfortunately, that’s rarely the case. However, there are certain elements you should be aware of and take into consideration when in the field, that will reduce the likeliness of your images being blurry.
Listed in this article are the most common reasons why your images aren’t razor sharp.
For a few years now, I’ve had in my collection one very strange lens. I bought it primarily for it’s value as a collectible so, up until now, I haven’t really spent much time playing with it. Made in 1975, this manual focus Minolta MC Rokkor-X 40-80mm f/2.8 lens is one strange puppy. When it was first introduced, no other zoom lens could top its image quality and it really didn’t have much competition until more recent years. This is largely due to its very unique Gearbox design that sought to overcome the problem with zoom lenses that we still face today.
“Sharpness is a bourgeois (rich person) concept.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson
1. Softer lenses often have more soul
I remember when I started digital photography; the sharper the photo, the better.
In reality, a sharper photo is not a better photo. Often, a softer photograph gives you a more pleasing, soft, warm, and emotional aesthetic.
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!