Every photographer has had to deal with blurry pictures.
The important part is that you understand why your pictures are blurry
so you can fix them.
So today Tony and I are going to talk about eight reasons that your photos are
blurry and how to fix them.
The first problem
is that your pictures are blurry all over with a bit of motion
to them.
Your problem is probably camera shake. To fix camera shake, one thing you should
understand is the reciprocal rule.
That's just a fancy shmancy way of saying that your shutter speed should be
greater than your focal length. So if you're shooting at 50 millimeters, for
example, your shutter speed should be 1/50th or greater. An easy way to deal
with this is to switch your camera to shutter priority mode.
Make sure that your shutter speed is your focal length or greater and then
put your camera into auto ISO mode and that should eliminate camera shake.
Another way to eliminate camera shake is to use image stabilization or you can
work on your your technique with holding the camera. You can prop your arms up
against your body and that will help eliminate camera shake.
Or you could use a tripod. If you're still having problems with camera shake
and you're in a situation where you just can't fail,
maybe you're taking pictures of your kids blowing out their birthday candles.
You can just put your camera to auto mode and that should take care of it for
you.
The second most common problem is motion blur. With motion blur your subject isn't
holding completely still and you kind of see their movement in the picture.
As you can see still parts of the picture sharp but the subject itself is
blurry.
This is really easy to fix. Just put your camera into shutter priority mode and
pick a shutter speed that's fast enough to freeze the motion. With people,
like this,
1/60th is usually good. If they're playing sports, 1/250th or 1/500th. And
wildlife, you want to be at 1/1000th or 1/2000th. So i'll bump
this up to 1/250th because Chelsea was moving pretty fast and we'll take
another picture.
I'm a constant sport.
If your problem is that the part of your photo that you
focused on is in focus, but the rest of your photo including the background is
blurry, you probably just have a shallow depth of field.
That's an easy fix
you just need to raise your aperture number. So if you have a low f-stop
number like f/1.8, raise it to f/5.6 or something higher.
It's a common problem when people buy a new lens like a new 50 millimeter f/1.8,
because they're not used to working with shallow depth of field. It's one of the
benefits of those lenses, but it's also one of the challenges.
Another common problem is missed focus. Especially when you're using a lens with
shallow depth of field, cameras aren't perfect and they often miss focus.
let's take a look at what happens
To make sure you nail the focus every time, use a single small focus point. And if
you're shooting people,
place it on their closest eye. Also be sure to take lots of pictures and refocus,
because no camera gets focus perfect a hundred percent of the time.
So let's try that again.
Another way to solve it is to use a higher f-stop
number, just like you wanted to increase your depth of field.
Now let's talk about air quality. We'll have to head outside for this and it's
pretty cold,
so we're going to bundle up.
Alright, so this will be a good example of what we-
oh my gosh it's way too cold out here.
All right we're ready let's go.
Alright, so the farther your subject is from you the more haze and humidity and
all that other air garbage there is between you and your subject. Especially
if it's a hazy or foggy day, a subject that's far away it is going to appear slightly
out of focus or not sharp.
So I'll take a picture of Tony not too far away with this 50 millimeter lens
to show you how it looks.
So it looks nice and clear, he's not so far away.
So Tony is going to move far away and I'm going to keep him the same size in
the frame, but use
ah, this monster. Ok, so now Tony is the same size in the frame but very far away
so let's see what happens.
What about light quality? That could be your problem.
The softer the light, the softer your picture. If you have hard light your picture will
be sharper but you probably won't want that for a portrait.
It is good for wildlife pictures, though. One more thing that can cause problems
is focusing systems that are misaligned just a little bit.
people often blame their focusing problems on the camera, but it's very
rarely the problem. If you check chapter 5 in Stunning Digital Photography, we
walk you through the entire process of troubleshooting. And I know what you're
thinking, this video is great how do I learn more from you two?
We wrote a whole book, 9 hours of video plus a community that will help you out
with problems like these.
So you think we're great and you want to support us by our book, Stunning Digital
Photography. And don't forget to click subscribe for more free videos and
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Thanks so much.