The thing about sharpness is it's not all as objective as it first appears.
Often I take a shot and look at it on the screen and think - yeh that looks really good. Then I get home and import it to lightroom, click the image to zoom and immediately think eurgh - that's not sharp at-all.
But if you look at the popular images on a site like flickr, and where available view it at the original size, you will probably find that many of the images are also pretty ugly at 100%. The huge megapixel count of sensors now means that 100% is even closer than it was in the past which dramatically exaggerates imperfections when looking at them full size - so you can spend all day looking at your images at 100% and feel down about how horrific all your pictures look - but if nobody ever sees it at that zoom level it's virtually irrelevant. I don't know if that's what you're doing but it's always something worth bearing in mind.
However, at some point where that lack of sharpness is large enough that it can translate in to a real world problem that makes the whole image look off.
This would normally be caused by one of:
Movement, i.e.:
-Camera shake
-Subject movement
or Focusing issues, i.e.:
-Too shallow depth of field
-Misfocusing
I don't know what camera you are using, but for example:
#1 of your flowers - the Canon 50mm f/1.8 (and maybe the Nikon as well?) are always a little soft wide open. Additionally the closer you get to your subject the narrower the depth of field, so even less will be in focus. Were you using a tripod? I'm assuming yes as if handheld at 1/40th you would almost certainly get camera shake.
When you are using a tripod you should consider using a remote shutter and mirror lockup mode if not already to prevent any movement of the camera.
For shots 5 and 6 particularly these are quite slow so any movement of the camera will affect the sharpness, and ditto any movement of the flower. 6 however does look pretty sharp along the focal plane so I don't think there is anything wrong there, however the depth of field is still quite shallow as it is macro. Much of the image that is in focus is pushed to the bottom of the image. The centre does seem to be sharp but this particular species of flower does have a habit of looking soft in the middle because of all of those funny pointy bits (I have had this problem many times and don't generally take pictures of flowers like this any more!). In this case the water droplets are really what makes the image interesting and most of the droplets that are immediately obvious are slightly out of focus. It's only when you look down to the bottom where you see some sharp ones from the side.
Narrow apertures will cause some diffraction as I've mentioned earlier but normally this is a trade-off in macro shots that you just have to live with.
Also just for completeness, for any lenses with IS, you should disable it when using a tripod (my 55-250 gives ridiculous results with it enabled on a tripod).
With shots like these flowers I would easily take 100+ shots experimenting and only find one or two of them are actually any good. Bouquets or bunches of flowers particularly are quite hard to get right. Whereas when it comes to something big like tulips they tend to stand much more on their own so it's really easy to get good isolated shots and try out different angles.
Often I take a shot and look at it on the screen and think - yeh that looks really good. Then I get home and import it to lightroom, click the image to zoom and immediately think eurgh - that's not sharp at-all.
But if you look at the popular images on a site like flickr, and where available view it at the original size, you will probably find that many of the images are also pretty ugly at 100%. The huge megapixel count of sensors now means that 100% is even closer than it was in the past which dramatically exaggerates imperfections when looking at them full size - so you can spend all day looking at your images at 100% and feel down about how horrific all your pictures look - but if nobody ever sees it at that zoom level it's virtually irrelevant. I don't know if that's what you're doing but it's always something worth bearing in mind.
However, at some point where that lack of sharpness is large enough that it can translate in to a real world problem that makes the whole image look off.
This would normally be caused by one of:
Movement, i.e.:
-Camera shake
-Subject movement
or Focusing issues, i.e.:
-Too shallow depth of field
-Misfocusing
I don't know what camera you are using, but for example:
#1 of your flowers - the Canon 50mm f/1.8 (and maybe the Nikon as well?) are always a little soft wide open. Additionally the closer you get to your subject the narrower the depth of field, so even less will be in focus. Were you using a tripod? I'm assuming yes as if handheld at 1/40th you would almost certainly get camera shake.
When you are using a tripod you should consider using a remote shutter and mirror lockup mode if not already to prevent any movement of the camera.
For shots 5 and 6 particularly these are quite slow so any movement of the camera will affect the sharpness, and ditto any movement of the flower. 6 however does look pretty sharp along the focal plane so I don't think there is anything wrong there, however the depth of field is still quite shallow as it is macro. Much of the image that is in focus is pushed to the bottom of the image. The centre does seem to be sharp but this particular species of flower does have a habit of looking soft in the middle because of all of those funny pointy bits (I have had this problem many times and don't generally take pictures of flowers like this any more!). In this case the water droplets are really what makes the image interesting and most of the droplets that are immediately obvious are slightly out of focus. It's only when you look down to the bottom where you see some sharp ones from the side.
Narrow apertures will cause some diffraction as I've mentioned earlier but normally this is a trade-off in macro shots that you just have to live with.
Also just for completeness, for any lenses with IS, you should disable it when using a tripod (my 55-250 gives ridiculous results with it enabled on a tripod).
With shots like these flowers I would easily take 100+ shots experimenting and only find one or two of them are actually any good. Bouquets or bunches of flowers particularly are quite hard to get right. Whereas when it comes to something big like tulips they tend to stand much more on their own so it's really easy to get good isolated shots and try out different angles.
Last edited:
