DIY Photography

Your one stop shop for everything photo-video

Search

Submit A Story

Sharpness

Why your landscape photos aren’t sharp, and how to fix it

by 4 Comments

As photographers, we’ve all experienced the frustration of capturing photos that turn out to be blurry, lacking crispness, or even shaky. We often need help with these issues when reviewing our images on a larger screen despite carefully composing our shots and selecting subjects.

These common mistakes can happen to photographers at any level, but with a better understanding of how to avoid them, you can ensure sharper, more stable photos. This video from landscape photographer Photo Tom explores common mistakes that can lead to unsharp or shaky photos and gives tips on avoiding them.

How to get sharper landscape images in camera

by Add Comment

A pin-sharp landscape image is a beautiful thing. But how often do we come back from a day out shooting, download our images, and find that we just don’t quite have everything in the perfect sharp focus that we all desire? It can be disappointing, particularly if you find it happening over and over again.

But fear not, there’s a way to get sharper images in camera. To do that, you need to understand lens diffraction. In this video, Gavin Hardcastle delves deeper into how you can get the most from your camera and lens and take sharp photos every time you go out.

This is why your photos aren’t sharp

by Add Comment

With our fancy cameras and lenses, we want to take as sharp photos as possible. I know I was excited when I bought my first DSLR and lens, but I soon discovered that it was much harder to get a razor-sharp image than I thought.

Thankfully, it’s far from impossible, you just need to learn some basics. In this video, Simon d’Entremont gives you a “sharpness checklist” to keep in mind before you start shooting. If you’re a newbie, this will be extremely useful, and you’ll get those tack-sharp images in no time.

7 tips for shooting sharper landscape photographs

by 1 Comment

No matter what genere we shoot, photographers always seem to be on a quest for sharper images. No matter how sharp they may already be, we’re always trying to squeeze just a little more sharpness performance out of our cameras and lenses. There are a few things we can do though, particularly for landscape photographers, that don’t involve going out and buying more expensive lenses.

In this video, landscape photographer Mike Smith walks us through seven of his top tips for getting sharper images when shooting landscapes. Some of them you may already know and apply to your own photography, but there are probably at least one or two that you might not have tried.

MTF charts – What are they? How do you read them? And why should we care?

by Add Comment

Whenever a new lens is released, we almost always see those infamous MTF charts posted along with the product images. But what exactly are MTF charts? What are they? Why are they a thing? How do you read them? And why should you care?

In this video, photographer Dustin Abbot goes into a deep dive on MTF charges to explain exactly what they are and how they’re of benefit to photographers. While he does go quite detailed into the charts, it’s an easy to understand analysis of what they are.

Mirrorless autofocus is Useless, unless…

by 1 Comment

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.

If Sharpness Truly Mattered Cartier-Bresson Would Be a Joke

by 6 Comments

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.

This Mavic 2 Pro vs Phantom 4 Pro comparison puts image sharpness reports to the test

by 3 Comments

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.

Six reasons why your landscape images aren’t razor sharp

by 1 Comment

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.

A forgotten solution for tack sharp photos

by 3 Comments

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.

Free Resources

Advanced lighting book

Learn photography

Recent Posts