Sharp is good, soft is bad…

Do you get frustrated when your shots turn out to be too soft? I certainly do, so I thought I’d put together this guide to help you improve sharpness.

Photography is a complicated pastime. There’s lots to learn—and lots to go wrong! Most people want to see sharp pictures, so it’s the photographer’s job to make that happen, but it’s easy to make silly mistakes, and those mistakes are almost impossible to put right.

There are six parameters that affect sharpness:

• Aperture

• Shutter speed (or time value)

• ISO

• Focus

• Camera

• Lens

Broadly speaking, aperture controls depth of field, shutter speed controls motion blur, ISO controls noise levels and the autofocus system controls where the focus point is.

However, it’s a little bit more complicated than that, so let’s examine each of those in a bit more detail.

Aperture

Almost all photographers know that a narrower aperture provides more depth of field. This is simply the band where objects look ‘acceptably sharp. It obviously includes the point the camera is actually focusing on, and roughly a third of it is closer to you, and roughly two-thirds is further away.

You just have to remember that changing your aperture won’t achieve perfect sharpness if you miss focus for whatever reason. If you’re not actually focused precisely on the eye, it’ll never be as sharp as you want it to be—even if you use f/22!

The aperture setting only controls the depth of field, and the depth of field is only ‘acceptably sharp’. Even then, your depth of field also depends on two other factors:

• distance from the subject

• focal length.

The closer you are and the longer your focal length, the shallower your depth of field will be. This changes all the time, though, so it’s impossible to keep track of what it will be for every single shot.

To get a clearer idea, you can either use the depth of field preview button (on DSLRs), check the viewfinder (on ‘WYSIWYG’ mirrorless cameras) or just take a test shot—if you have time!

Alternatively, you can use a smartphone app to guide you. There are plenty of them out there, but I personally use one called SetMyCamera. All you have to do is enter the camera, focal length and distance from the subject, and the app will show you the exact depth of field (plus the near and far points, the hyperfocal distance and the standard print size and standard view distance).

You might be surprised by how limited the depth of field actually is. If I take a picture of an animal 25 feet away with my Sony a1 and a 600mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter, my depth of field will be less than an inch!

Sensor size also matters in a way, but only indirectly. If you assume the image fills the frame using a full-frame and a crop-sensor camera, the depth of field will be lower on the full-frame camera. However, that’s just because a crop-sensor camera multiplies the effective focal length by the crop factor (usually either 1.5x or 1.6x), so you’d have to stand closer or use a longer lens in order to fill the frame with the full-frame camera.

As a wildlife photographer, you’ll usually be focusing on the eyes of the animal or bird and shooting wide open, but let’s look at what might go wrong with your aperture setting and leave you with the shot looking too soft.

1. More than one subject. If you’re shooting more than one animal or bird, then your depth of field obviously needs to include them all—unless you deliberately want to blur out the ones behind or in front of your main subject.

2. Subject too close. In theory, we might not care if everything else is blurry as long as the eyes are sharp. In practice, you might want just a little bit of the rest of the animal to be sharp, such as the eyelashes. If you’re really close to the subject, the depth of field might not even be enough for that.

3. Aperture too wide. Yes, it’s normally a good thing to shoot wide open so that you can minimise the depth of field and therefore separate your subject from the background. However, a lot of lenses achieve their maximum sharpness at around f/8 rather than f/4 or f/5.6.

4. Aperture too narrow. Crazy, right?! A narrow aperture is supposed to increase depth of field, not reduce it. Well, up to a point! If you use a very high f-stop such as f/22, you start to get diffraction effects. It depends on the lens, but the overall sharpness of the image will start to fall off.

Shutter Speed

Shutter speed generally controls motion blur, which can be caused by movement of the subject or by camera shake. Either way, the faster your shutter speed, the less motion blur there’ll be. On the other hand, a higher shutter speed means a higher ISO, which means more chance of noise. Fortunately, noise can be fixed in post using Topaz Labs Sharpen AI or DeNoise AI (click here to get 15% off using nickdale15), but motion blur is far harder to do anything about.

Sometimes, you might actually want motion blur. For instance, you might be taking a slow pan shof of a galloping rhino. In that case, obviously, you just need to find the shutter speed that’ll give you exactly the ‘right’ amount of blur in the legs and background while maintaining the sharpness of the eyes.

However, for most photographers in most situations, motion blur is the enemy, so let’s have a look at when you might need a faster shutter speed.

1. Moving subject. Well, duh! Of course you need a higher shutter speed if the animal is moving! The question, though, is how high? That depends on the speed, which in turn usually depends on the species. Cheetahs run faster than Cape buffaloes, and little bee-eaters fly faster (and more unpredictably) than herons.
   It also depends on the angle of movement: if the animal is coming straight towards you, there’s less relative movement than if it were moving across the frame.
   I generally use 1/1000 of a second as my default shutter speed on a game drive, but I’ll boost that to 1/2000 if I’m dealing with playful cheetah cubs, say, and to 1/3200 if I’m taking pictures of birds.
   As wildlife photographer Paul Goldstein once told me, “If you’re going for a s**t, you’d better lock the door!” In other words, it’s best to be on the safe side.

2. Camera shake. You can’t take pictures at too slow a shutter speed because of the limitations of the human body. You’re not made of concrete, so there’ll inevitably be a little bit of wobble when you hold the camera—unless you’re able to use a tripod.
   Some people have issues relating to age and health that make it even harder to avoid camera shake, and heavy DSLRs with telephoto lenses don’t help.
   There’s a rule of thumb that says you should always use a shutter speed that’s at least one over the focal length (ie 1/400 of a second with a 400 mm lens). However, Nikon’s vibration reduction and Canon and Sony’s image stabilisation mean you can use a shutter speed that’s anything from four to eight stops slower.

ISO

ISO is the third element of the Exposure Triangle. You might not normally think of it as affecting sharpness, but it does so indirectly. The higher the ISO, the more noise there is. Blotchiness is the enemy of sharpness, and images also typically lose contrast and colour fidelity.

There are different techniques to avoiding noise, and you can always try to fix it in post, but the best way is probably to ‘expose to the right’ (ETTR). That means adding, say, two-thirds of a stop of exposure compensation to every shot you take. That helps because more light means less noise. Noise is generally visible in background shadows, so lightening the whole image means those shadows are brighter—which means less noise. You can always bring down the highlights and whites in Lightroom if the whole thing is just too bright.

Just make sure you don’t end up ‘clipping’ the whites when you actually take the picture. You can do that by checking the histogram on the back of the camera.

What you don’t want to do is use negative exposure compensation in an effort to keep the ISO as low as possible. All that means is that you’d have to brighten the image in post, and that’s when the noise would reappear. Tests show that the results would actually be worse than if you expose correctly or use ETTR.

The only exception is when the camera has dual native base ISOs. The whole reason for that is to reduce noise, and it is a possible solution. My own cameras, for instance, have a native base ISO of 100 and also 500. That means I could take pictures at 500 ISO even when it ‘should’ be more than that and simply brighten the image in Lightroom. I haven’t yet tried that, but it might be worth a punt if I ever find myself taking pictures of a black bear at midnight!

So when does the ISO setting usually become a problem?

1. Low light. This is the classic time when the ISO starts to soar—whether you use Auto ISO or set it yourself. There’s only so much light available, and it’s just not enough to get the shutter speed and/or aperture settings you want at a low ISO.

2. Silly mistakes. In theory, if there’s enough light, the ISO should never get too high, but mistakes do happen. There are so many settings to think about that it’s easy to forget to check your ISO. I once took an underexposed portrait of a giraffe at 1/4000 of a second and 1000 ISO when I would’ve been far better off using 1/1000 at 250 ISO…!

Autofocus

This is a big subject. Most modern DSLRs and mirrorless cameras have very sophisticated autofocus systems including eye detection that make it as easy as possible to get the right part of the animal in focus. However, nothing’s perfect, and the fact that they’re so complex means they often go wrong.

To get the best out of your autofocus system, you need to set it up in the right way and understand the trade-offs involved. For example, using the Wide focus area on my Sony a1 might be more convenient as it covers the entire frame, but it won’t have much luck focusing on the eye of a leopard in a tree surrounded by leaves branches!

I could talk about autofocus for hours, but let’s pick out the most likely problems.

1. Silly mistakes. I put this first because I honestly believe it’s the most likely reason why a shot isn’t sharp. It’s easy to knock a switch accidentally or forget to change your settings from a previous shot. On my old D850, the autofocus switch was on the left side of the camera body. If it was in the wrong position, the autofocus wouldn’t work no matter what I did. A lot of telephoto lenses have an equivalent switch on the barrel that toggles between AF for Autofocus and MF for Manual Focus. Again, it’s easy to end up on the wrong setting. Mirrorless cameras make life easier because you can set up custom modes that reset everything, but even then you can still get into trouble. I once tried to take a picture of a chameleon on someone’s head, but I couldn’t get my Sony a1 to focus. I tried three times and eventually had to use my iPhone instead—and all because the ‘lock’ switch on the battery grip was in the wrong position!

2. Wrong settings. This is almost as common a problem as silly mistakes. Again, modern autofocus systems are so complex that it takes real intellectual effort to understand how they’re supposed to work in different situations. That makes it easy to set it up wrongly—especially if you’ve just bought a new camera.
   Just make sure you switch autofocus on, choose between AF-C and AF-S and pick the best focus mode (DSLR) and/or focus area (mirrorless). Everything else is just gravy…

3. Manual focus. There are occasions when it’s perfectly fine to use manual focus. If you do a lot of macro work, for example, you might find that works better. However, it does introduce the possibility of human error. In my experience, it’s very hard to match the autofocus system of my camera using manual focus. Whether it’s down to poor eyesight or clumsiness or the limitations of the equipment, I just can’t get the hang of it…

4. Poor camera technique. If you handhold your camera when you’re shooting, it pays to get the basics right: hold the body in your right hand and the barrel of the lens in the palm of your left. Press the camera against your forehead to minimise camera shake and tuck your elbows in to your sides. If you’re attempting a ‘difficult’ shot like a slow pan, the challenge is even greater. If you either haven’t been taught how to do it properly or haven’t had enough practice, the likelihood is that you’ll end up with too many shots that aren’t sharp enough.

Camera

I’m a great believer in the wonders of modern technology, and I always try to give myself the best chance for success by buying the best gear. I recently invested in my pair of Sony a1 mirrorless camera bodies because I thought they were the best wildlife cameras on the market—and I still think that!

If you don’t have the budget for the camera of your dreams or you find yourself for whatever reason using a lower-resolution camera, then the inevitable result is going to be a loss of sharpness. That’s something you’ll just have to accept, but it doesn’t stop you doing as much as possible to get the most out of your equipment.

Megapixels aren’t everything, and it’s perfectly possible to get good, sharp shots with a crop-sensor 24 MP camera—as long as you don’t try to fill the whole wall with one of your prints!

Lens

The same goes for the lenses you use. Not everyone can afford the very best glass, so if you’re stuck with something cheaper, you have to make the best of it.

One thing I learned when I had my Nikon cameras and lenses was that fine-tuning the autofocus was really important. I went to Svalbard to see the polar bears and basically ruined the whole trip by not doing that! Almost every shot was soft. I thought it might be the Sigma lens I was using, but it’s more likely that it was that the lens didn’t quite ‘match’ the camera body.

It’s possible to fine-tune your lenses yourself using a program called FoCal by Reikan, but it’s a bit of a hassle. You have to set up a paper target, put your camera on a tripod, download the software, set it going and then change various settings as the camera takes a series of pictures.

That’s how I started out, but I quickly switched to asking CameraCal to do it for me…!

Now I have mirrorless cameras, those days are fortunately over. Mirrorless cameras and lenses don’t need fine-tuning as the autofocusing happens at the sensor level. Phew…!

Conclusion

Like many photographers, I like my images to be tack-sharp, so I totally understand the frustration of seeing what you thought was going to be a perfect shot turn out to be a blurry mess.

All you can do is buy the best gear you can afford and pay attention to the settings and situations I’ve described. The more you understand your camera and what it can do, the more chance you’ll have of getting sharp images to add to your portfolio.

Good luck…!

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