It took me years to find a multitude of reasons why my photos weren’t always as sharp as I expected. You can cut out all that study time by watching a video that sums it all up.
Coming to you from Tony and Chelsea Northrup might be the best combination of all the reasons why you might not get sharp shots. I’m not kidding there; I’ve fallen down a lot of this rabbit hole myself trying to figure it out and I wish I had something like this to help me get there.
There isn’t enough space to go into the full list that Tony and Chelsea go through, but from personal experience I can totally agree with a few of these. Their last tip on micro-adjustment was particularly painful, because I spent countless hours painfully adjusting the 5D Mark III and still never quite felt the focus where I wanted it to be. . Hindsight is 20/20, good to be confirmed there. It probably has nothing to do with the camera’s micro-adjustment. Thankfully, as Tony mentioned, this is an issue that has largely gone away with mirrorless cameras, one that I discovered when I dropped it. Panasonic Lumix G 20mm f/1.7 II ASPH. lens on the ground during a wedding, where it broke into three pieces. I smashed it together, and it was good enough, but to my surprise it still took perfectly sharp photos. It seems that focusing directly on the sensor is beneficial in favor of rotating the lens to wherever it is needed to focus, damaged lens elements will be ruined.
One trick I don’t use often that they share is to always keep burst mode on for almost any image you take. This way, the first and last photo in the series where your finger scrolls up and off the shutter may not be in focus, but the images in the middle will have better sharpness because there is less movement just from a simple press of the shutter button. Chelsea adds to this by mentioning that shooting with the self-timer can eliminate shake, which I often do during long exposures to avoid camera shake when I forget the remote. It’s not like you’re wasting film by taking multiple photos to get one, so use it.
There are plenty of other secret reasons why photos are shaky that took years of research to understand – I’m looking at you, shutter shock and diffraction – but there are plenty of more mundane reasons why your photo might look shaky. may be out of focus.
This is a really good list. Check out all the reasons in the video above.
