Landscape picture with action, advise asked

[btaylor]

blurry due to diffraction caused by the narrow aperture, and the bird is blurry due to the long shutter speed.)

Keep on shooting (and sharing)!

That's a good run down by CLS and the quoted section above really sums up the two main points that I was thinking too, it's also something that I remember having to get my head around when I first began using a DSLR.

The (very) basic idea is that lens / camera combos have a "sweet spot" in terms of what aperture will provide the best sharpness. It is generally somewhere between f/8 to f/11 with a bit of variation either side. Any narrower (i.e. higher f/ number) and lenses start to be effected by diffraction with results in loss of sharpness.

For a scene like yours I think f/11 at 29mm would be more that sufficient to provide a deep enough depth of field to keep your scene in focus. There's a great website called Depth of Field Master [ http://www.dofmaster.com/ ] where you can put in your shooting parameters and it will calculate the depth of field. There's an app for smartphones available as well.

I threw your settings into it and assumed that you were 10m from the duck and below is what is spat out:


So it's telling you that the scene will be in focus from 2.82m to infinity, which would cover everything in your picture.

The other side of the story is the shutter speed. If you don't have a steady have then you may suffer from blur as a result of camera shake at 1/40 secs. By reducing your aperture setting to f/11 you will have a much faster shutter speed which will in turn help to eliminate camera shake.


Hope this helps a bit.

Ben.

[Marco van Eck]

Wow, thanks a lot for all the insights given Sean, CLS and Ben! It's very much appreciated

Needless to say I went back this evening to give it another go. But now the sun was in front of me and there was a lot less light as the sun was going down...

I tried several Av settings, even tried the Landscape setting, went back and forth several times. I got the "best" result at F/11, the camera set the ISO value to 1250 though probably resulting in the grain I'm seeing. At least the picture is a lot sharper now. Guess I need to learn to watch all settings instead of hoping the camera does the works for me

O well, back to trying and learning!

Here's my "best" shot of this setting, shame me on the high ISO setting.


LandscapeWaterDucks_0107 by Marco van Eck, on Flickr

Edit: EXIF: F/11, 1/60s, ISO 1250, 33mm focal length

I have another question though. In the shots I made now I often saw a small purple glow around the leaves at the highlights in the picture, the sky. I figure it has something to do with the sun shining on those parts in the photo's? I'm not getting what causes this as it happened at different settings.

Cheers!

[Steph]

O well, back to trying and learning!

If you want to learn about all that, I found the book "understanding exposure" pretty good. You might not like the style of the author but the pieces of advice are very good. He covers DOF/aperture and where to measure to get what you want (i.e. what you needed here)

[Steph]

There's a great website called Depth of Field Master [ http://www.dofmaster.com/ ] where you can put in your shooting parameters and it will calculate the depth of field. There's an app for smartphones available as well.

That's a pretty cool website. I always wanted to compute it myself and create a sort of table where I could have the common values but this is much better. Thanks for sharing! It's already bookmarked

[Sean Setters]

That's a pretty cool website. I always wanted to compute it myself and create a sort of table where I could have the common values but this is much better. Thanks for sharing! It's already bookmarked

They also have an app for the iOS and Android; it's very useful to keep on hand.