(Click on the image to enlarge it.)
The photo above was taken with a Nikon D700 camera, a 300mm f/2.8 lens and a 2x Teleconverter.The shot was a f/6.3 at 1/60/sec. I used a Nikon SB-900 flash. The camera was balanced on the sill of the car window, as I was using my BMW as a photo blind (!?!)
Water pipits are neat little winter visitors to wet meadows and shorelines, as well as newly-plowed fields here in the American South in winter. They are not particularly hard to find, but they are hard to photograph, as they are (a) sparrow-sized, and (b) plain brown and buff birds against a background that's generally plain and brownish, complicated by (c) the fact that they are always moving...head, legs, tail...always moving.
So the topic today is sharpness -- eliminating blur. I've had multiple people spend time with me this week talking about issues relating to "blurry pictures." Some blame the lens, some blame the camera; but the fact is that both assertions are generally incorrect -- the problem is typically user-based and can be user-remedied.
I saw shots of a kid running indoors, taken hand-held at 1/20 second. They were blurry. The shooter said the camera used to do a better job. But this is not the camera's fault -- the 1/20 sec shutter speed was simply too slow to "freeze" the subject. Because during that 20th of a second that the shutter was open the subject was moving. And during the exposure, he went from about HERE to HERE on the frame, and that produced the "ghosted," blurry image.
Another shot was a hand-held macro photo of flowers. Upon close examination, the shot was indeed soft...not sharp. But looking at the shooting data revealed that the photo was taken at 1/30 second. Again, too slow for hand-held, high-magnification work. And to attempt life-size macro-photography with a hand-held camera is to set oneself up to fail. The camera needs to be steadied with a tripod.
Blur comes from one of two sources: movement by the subject or movement by the photographer/camera. If you want consistently sharp images, you must control for both. Photographer/camera movement is the easier of the two sources to control. Use a tripod whenever possible. use a cable release when you can...anything to keep the camera from moving or being moved as the exposure is being made. And when you can, use the old rule: try to shoot at shutter speeds above the reciprocal of the focal length (i.e., 1/200 sec for a 200mm lens, 1/50 sec for a 50mm lens.) Yes, I know about VR and IS, but caution adds a useful buffer for creating sharper images.
Subject movement is a trickier issue. You may "stop" motion with relatively slow shutter speeds when the subject is moving directly toward or directly away from the camera. This is because the subjects position on the sensor doesn't change as much during the exposure as a subject moving laterally across the frame. And subjects that are small in the frame are easier to "freeze" with a slower shutter speed that a larger subject for the same reason: not much change about the space the subject occupies during the exposure.
Subjects that occupy much of the frame, or that move verically or laterally during the exposure are tricky, though, and they require techique. Keep your shutter speeds relatively high. Lenses with fast maximum apertures are a boon here, and I think this is a major reason that you see professionals carrying "fast glass" -- lenses of f/2.8 or even faster. You may need to use high ISO settings in order to achieve your fast shutter speeds. So be it. Most modern DSLR's are pretty good up to and sometimes beyond, ISO 1600.
And for me, this is a major reason I use flash on such a high proportion of my photos -- the duration of the flash is extremely brief, and as a result, it gives the effect of a very fast shutter speed. Learn to use your flash: it is the Unfair Advantage!
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