Landscape picture with action, advise asked

[Marco van Eck]

Only got my DSLR last week. I'd like to ask some advise on one of the shots I made.

The picture below was meant to be a landscape kinda photo with action in it. As I had to hurry I closed the aperture fast to 29 (max I guess) to get it all sharp (Av setting) and hoped the Moorhen (looked that word up in the English dictionary ) would also be sharp.

It didn't work out at all, everything is blurry. The white clouds in the sky were completely gone in the original RAW file. I used Photoshop to get it a bit sharper and to add some sky with the following settings:
crs:Exposure2012="+0.35"
crs:Contrast2012="+8"
crs:Highlights2012="-100"

Camera info and settings: Canon EOS 650D, Lens="EF-S18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS II", Av setting 29, Shutter 1/40, ISO 500, focal length 29mm



My questions are of course what I should have done to get a sharper image? As I couldn't wait lowering the shutter speed was no option. I took the picture by hand maybe I moved the camera too much for the 1/40 shutter setting?

AF points


Thanks a lot for any advise given!

Best regards,
Marco

[Sean Setters]

1) You probably don't need to shoot at maximum aperture to get the best (sharpest) results. So first of all, widen your aperture a bit to allow for faster shutter speeds (f/8-f/16 would probably be fine).

2) A higher ISO will also allow you to shoot at a faster shutter speed.

Just to be safe, try to keep the active focus point on your subject.

[cls]

Hi, maybe I have some ideas that could help you make your next attempt at a similar scene better.

First one basic thing: The metering system of the camera is trying to find an exposure setting where the average brightness of the frame is grey. If you mix dark areas (like shadows under trees) with bright areas (like sunlit clouds), your camera can't show them both with detail. You will likely get black shadows and all-white sky. You simply have to choose what to expose for. In this shot the main subject (the bird) is in the shadows and you would probably like to have some detail in the shadows. Then you will basically have to live with blown highlights in the sky. I would say in this case the exposure is OK.

When it comes to depth of field you're right that a narrow aperture will make more of the scene appear in focus. However f/29 is kind of extreme, I would say in this case you would have been OK with f/5.6-f/8. DOF depends heavily on distance to subject: E.g. if you focus at a very close subject, you won't get much DOF even at f/22 (or f/29). On the other hand, if you focus at a subject relatively far away, anything relatively far away within the frame will appear to be sharp. In this case you were at 29 mm focal length and the distance to the bird could be 10 meters or so. If you focus at 10 m with focal lenghth 29 mm I guess everything within the frame will appear sharp more or less regardless of aperture.

So, the next time you're shooting landscapes, set the camera to Av with f/7.1 or so - this will be OK for most shots (provided you want large depth of field). If you have enough light (like in this case), set ISO to 100. In daylight this will typically give you shutter time around 1/500 sec which would be OK for freezing many action scenes. In a case like this I would have chosen f/5.6-f/6.3 (enough for DOF at 29 mm and speeds up the shutter a bit) and maybe ISO 200 if the acion was really fast.

(What the camera did for you when you set it to Av, f/29, was that it calculated the proper exposure at ISO 100 that would have been around 1/8 sec. The camera thinks this time is too long at 29 mm focal length and increases ISO to 500 just to make it easy to take the shot without motion blur. This means that you get at shot where the static scene is rather 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)!

[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!

[Sean Setters]

The purple fringing is the result of CA, or chromatic aberrations. Most lenses exhibit purple fringing to some degree, although some are much worse than others. The purple fringing usually shows up in areas of high contrast. If you'd like to know more, look up "chromatic aberration" or "purple fringing" on wikipedia.

[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

[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)

[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.

[Marco van Eck]

Thanks again

When I made a satisfactory photo of this setting I'll be sure to post it.

Cheers.