Got BLURRY Photos? Find Out WHY and How to REDUCE Them!

g'day and welcome to the channel do you ever wonder why you get soft shots do you ever wonder if it's the camera is it the lens is it you i'm here to tell you today that soft shots are normal and i've been getting soft shots for 10 years the key is to understanding why we get soft shots and what we can do to reduce the number that we get that's what today's video is going to be all about i'm going to share with you why we get soft shots and how to prevent them so with social media our feeds are filled with the very best shots photographers take it's sharp shot after sharp shot you'll see a shot like this hooded plover i took nice and sharp plenty of detail and i suspect many beginners get frustrated as they look at their own images and wonder why they're a little bit soft and lacking sharpness what beginners don't see are all those soft shots that photographers delete so what do i mean by a soft shot well a soft shot to me is one that's lacking detail and sharpness so you can see the difference between these two shots on the screen they're both taken with the same lens the same camera same location but the image on the left is what i would call sharp and it's got some good detail but the image on the right is blurry it's just out of focus so the detail's just missing that's what we want to avoid so what causes these soft shots well there's actually a lot more than i thought today i think i'm going to cover probably the main seven so there are quite a few so those being motion blur camera shake auto focus lighting and exposure the lens heat haze and of course post processing let's have a look at each one of those in a little bit more detail first main cause of soft shots is motion blur that's when the bird moves at the point of exposure so you hit the shutter and the birds moved and the shutter speed is too slow to freeze the action so there's some sort of blurry part of the image and it can generally be very easy to identify because the feet or the perch will be sharp where the bird was moving will be out of focus you can see with the superb fairy end feet in the perch are nice and sharp but it's moved its head at the very time i took the photo so the head's actually got some motion blur and it's soft so a similar shot to this one but there's no movement and the entire bird is nice and sharp so when you take a photo the camera will let a certain amount of light through the lens onto the sensor and the amount of time that is is called our shutter speed so the longer that time is so say you had a second shutter speed that means you hit the shutter and when the shutter comes down it's open for a second and any movement in that second will be captured by the sensor and that often results in movement so to overcome that we need really fast shutter speed you can see this indian yellow nosed albatross to capture and freeze that burden action i actually used a very high shutter speed of 1 6 400th of a second which is just so quick but that's enabled us to freeze the bird as it's flying across the water if we're wanting to capture some sort of action without motion blur i generally suggest a shutter speed of over 1 800th of a second for example the swamp hand jumping up with its wings out this was taken at one one thousandth of a second and you can see that the wingtips are slightly blurry so we haven't fully freezed the action but we still got this shot compare that to this king penguin and this has taken it pretty much as fast as the shutter will go at 1 8 000 of a second and everything is frozen in place the water the wings the bird everything it's pretty hard to get a shutter speed this high all right the second main cause and this is the one i probably have the most trouble with is camera shake that is the camera is moving at the time of the exposure and if the camera is moving often the whole image will be blurry so instead of just say the bird being blurry the whole image is now blurry this is often a bigger issue with long focal lengths or when you're hand holding your lens you just can't get it as stable as on a tripod so the reason this happens to me is birds are often moving and i'm moving my camera to try and catch up with the bird or frame the bird and i'm just i'm just not creating a solid stable platform when i'm doing that so i'm to blame but i just you know it's often you just can't get around it when you're trying to track a bird so this is mainly an issue with slower shutter speeds say under 1 400th of a second at higher shutter speeds it's less of an issue but it can still happen all right so what's the best way to reduce the camera shake and the motion blur well it's a combination of using higher shutter speeds and having a stable platform if you use a heavy lens i'd highly suggest either a monopod or a tripod with a gimbal on it they just create that stable platform that enables the camera to be a lot more steady when you're taking a burst of photos and when you're using long lens there is a proper technique that you're supposed to use and that's you know creating a few points of contact so if you've got your lens on a tripod is to have your face up close to the camera so you know creating contact there either your hand on top of the lens or on the foot of the lens and holding it quite steady and taking the photos that way hopefully that will create that stable platform if you're lucky to have a light lens like the new 100 to 500 you can sort of hand hold that and keep it quite steady and not have an issue at all so a technology that's getting better and better is image stabilization so most cameras now will have in-body image stabilization which means the camera is actually stabilizing combine that with a lens that has is attached and together they make a really really stable sort of platform for shooting handheld or any type of shooting and it enables you to use lower shutter speeds and not get those blurry photos which is a great advantage so here's some footage of me hand holding my 500 millimeter lens without any is and on the right hand side this is with is and ibis engaged there's quite a big difference on how steady that image is and the viewfinder actually is a lot steadier too with the ibis if you don't have any is the viewfinder jumps around quite a bit and can be a little bit off-putting when you're trying to take photos the other technique i use is i shoot in bursts so you know when i'm taking photos i'm just hitting the shutter and taking you know bursts of shots maybe eight or ten shots even if i get the odd soft shot most of them are going to be sharp and so by shooting in bursts increases your odds of getting those keepers what shutter speeds would i recommend to reduce motion blur and camera shake well for perched birds i generally don't want to go any lower than 1 400th of a second that generally works for me and you can see with the silver eye i had slightly overcast conditions and i got this lovely shot at that 1 400th of a sec with waterfowl or swimming ducks or birds you do have to have slightly higher shutter speeds because they're moving so i generally try to have a minimum of 1 800th of a second and with birds and flight they need the highest shutter speeds of all and so to capture a shot like this wandering albatross i wouldn't want to go any lower than 1 000 of a second to capture the behaviour you really have to have those high shutter speeds however i realize it's not always possible perhaps you live in a country that just doesn't get the sun we get down here and you have to use lower shutter speeds i get that and i've experienced that a few times myself here's an australian magpie that was taken in a very dark rainforest type scenario and i actually had to use a shutter speed of 1 50th of a second which is very very slow but you can get sharp shots i just never expect to get any sort of behaviour or flying shot at those shutter speeds alright the one that we probably all have trouble with is the auto focus of the camera if your camera doesn't focus on the subject it's going to be soft i'll be honest that autofocus has been a big issue of mine over the years i suspect it's a bit of user error and the camera and the lens just not been able to keep up the other confusing thing is there's just so many autofocus settings in your camera to how do you know which ones to use i think it's just a matter of trying the different cases and picking one that works for you let's take a look at an example i was photographing this coot as it came through the reeds now i've put the focus point on the bird you know i've tracked the bird i've hit the shutter the shutter speed was really high i've taken a photo and when we review the image we see that the bird is completely soft but the reed just above the bird is sharp so for whatever reason the camera is actually focused in front of the bird even though the focus point was on the bird and these are the sort of challenges and frustrations that i'm sure you've experienced the subsequent shots after that were actually sharp so the camera and lens have caught up and it's been accurate which is good and another reason to take bursts of images i really love photographing sort of small shore birds that move around quickly on the ground and i believe this is probably one of the hardest conditions for your camera to operate in that is tracking a bird that's moving in erratic movements all over the place and i have to admit my keeper rate is pretty low when i'm photographing birds this way so for me i generally shoot an ai servo i have a high shutter speed and i have the focus point either a single focus point or expanded on the bird and i'm actually tracking the birders moving i'm holding down the focus taking the shots and i don't know at the time whether any of my photos are sharp so i'm just tracking the bird taking the photos it's not till after the session where i check them that i'm either disappointed or i'm happy and it's a real lucky dip to which shots are sharp and which ones are soft and we can see on the screen here's a shot of a redneck stint focus points on the bird but the birds just completely soft and then another shot and in the series the birds now got its head in the water it's feeding nice and sharp then another one the bird was coming directly at me focus point on the head but the bird's soft so who knows what i'm doing wrong here whether it's me the camera or a combination of both i will say cameras are getting better and better at their auto focus capabilities the r6 is a step above the 5d4 with the auto iaf it's just a lot more consistent and finding the bird focusing on the eye and keeping it in focus so what i often had to do on my old dslr was i'd actually focus on the bird take a couple of shots and then i'd actually defocus on purpose and then focus back on the bird take some shots and i often did that multiple times because occasionally the 5d4 for whatever reason would just simply miss focus and all your shots would be slightly soft and it's highly annoying if that happens so by focusing on the bird then releasing the focus focusing back on it increased your odds that at least one of these bursts the bird's going to be sharp so i think i just do that instinctively now without realizing it and maybe that's something you could try as well so obviously the professional bodies have more processing power dedicated to auto focus that's going to work better some lenses will focus a lot better with their focusing motor you know the faster the lens the the better it's going to be so there's a number of factors at play here that will dictate how well your autofocus works another issue i run into with a dslr is keeping the focus point on the bird's eye so obviously you put the focus point on the eye and as you're taking photos if the bird moves or you move the focus point will move with you it doesn't stay on the eye so you can see here with this kookaburra i've put the focus point on the eye but i've moved for whatever reason and it's actually grabbed the base of the beak and because of the really shallow depth of field the eye is actually slightly soft and that's not what we want that shows you how hard it can be and how easy it is just to miss focus luckily i was doing that focus defocus technique the birds moved and i've actually caught the edge of the eye here in this next shot and that one's sharp and i was able to use that i think the key to overcoming your autofocus woes is just understanding the limitations of your camera and being aware that you're going to have issues from time to time so doing the focus defocus thing taking lots of photos these will help but it's come a long way if you have a look at my 40d had nine focus points and compare that to the r6 which has focus points across the entire screen you can see why autofocus today is just so much better so another cause of soft shots on a dslr is whether your lens and your camera are calibrated properly what do i mean by this calibration well on a dslr it's obviously got a little autofocus sensor which receives light and then tells the camera the distance to focus on the camera will then send a message to the lens which will obviously focus to where it's supposed to or where it thinks it's supposed to so you'll focus on a point but if your lens isn't calibrated perfectly it's going to focus in front of the subject or just behind it so you can imagine when you've got really shallow depth of field this can quickly become an issue because you're probably focusing on the bird's eye but the lens is actually focusing just in front of it and you'll always have issues i think a lot of people probably have this issue without realizing it so modern cameras will allow you to make micro adjustments to change where the lens focuses but i've found this to be quite problematic there's tools like lens align and you can also send your camera and your lens to the manufacturer to be properly calibrated but it is quite hard luckily i don't think i've ever had too many issues with my camera and lenses but i know it is a big issue for some people well i'm happy to report that this issue is no more with a mirrorless camera mirrorless camera works completely differently and it actually uses the sensor to achieve autofocus so once the image is sharp or in focus on the screen that's when the lens will stop adjusting so it doesn't matter if your lens isn't calibrated properly because the camera will compensate for it so in theory if you're focused on a subject your shot will always be sharp i suspect this is why some lenses are probably sharper for people on a mirrorless body than it was on their dslr because it's always perfectly calibrated and that's a massive advantage of mirrorless alright another cause of soft shots is just poor light i go on about light i mentioned it quite a bit in my last video but if you don't have good light the image just isn't going to be as sharp it's not going to have as much detail and it's just going to look a bit soft you can see that with these two spoonbill shots both taken with the same gear on the same morning but one was just taken a little bit earlier you can see the image on the right it's still a nice shot it's still sharp but it's just lacking that fine detail and sharpness the image on the left the sun's now up it's a little bit sharper we're actually using a slightly lower iso and it just looks a lot better and in theory your camera will focus better with more light so if you don't have nice light your camera will also often struggle to focus i think one of the major causes for soft shots with beginners is overcropping your images so when we start out the birds often far away we take a shot we want the bird bigger in the frame so what do we do we crop that image quite heavily to make the bird bigger but when we do that we obviously lose image quality and it ends up looking just a little bit soft so you can see in this comparison on the left here the bird was quite a distance away it's an inland doterra and if i crop in heavily we lose all detail and it just looks a bit muddied and soft i was able to get quite a bit closer in that same session a bit nicer light and you can see the difference here same lens same camera but the results are obvious the image on the right is just so much better so try and minimize how much you crop well how do we do that well we have to get closer or get more focal length all right that brings us on to the lens and the lens is obviously going to make a difference to how sharp your images look so as you know i tested the canon f11 lenses recently and the rf 100 to 500 the difference between those two lenses was obvious to me i could tell just by looking at the images which one was taken with the 100 to 500 there's two images on the screen one of them taken with the 800 f11 the other with the 100 to 500 very similar conditions at the same location and roughly the same size bird which one to you looks a bit sharper for me it was the image on the right and that's the 100 to 500 it just looked a lot better and that's to be expected so each lens has a maximum aperture so my 405.6 the maximum aperture is 5.6 so if i was to shoot this with an aperture of 5.6 that's wide open to get the best sharpness i need to stop this down so one stop from 5.6 is f8 so ideally i want to be shooting between say f8 and f11 to get the maximum sharpness from this lens and that's possibly one of the biggest issues with the tamron and sigma zoom lenses a lot of people will shoot at 600 6.3 because 6.3 is the maximum aperture and often those shots are just a little bit soft i suspect if you shot at f9 or f10 you would get much sharper shots so i'd highly suggest if you can is to stop down by at least a stop see if that improves your shots so this one hasn't impacted me that much but it's definitely worth mentioning and that's heat haze so you've probably experienced it but that's when you get a shot like this chat image where it's just a little bit wavy it's soft and it's wavy and it doesn't matter what you do or what lens you have or how you change you're always going to have these soft shots i don't know the exact scientific reason for heat haze but when i've seen it it's generally when there's a difference in temperature between the ambient air and the ground so often on rocks next to the ocean you know if it gets really hot that the ground's cool or over long distances that's when you can get heat hose i believe you can get heat haze in very cold conditions so it's not necessarily just how hot it is i think it's just that difference in temperature and i don't actually know how you get around heat haze either you move location get closer or just wait for it to dissipate all right the last thing that impacts the sharpness of your images is just how much sharpness you apply and post processing so when you import an image into say a processor such as lightroom it actually applies sharpening to that image i think the default on lightroom is 40 and then there's quite a big difference between 40 sharpening and zero sharpening so this takahe image is quite sharp it's in focus if we remove that if we change that down to zero you can see that the image starts to look a little bit soft but when we move it back up to 40 or 50 it looks a lot sharper so how much sharpening you apply will definitely change how sharp the image looks i guess the key with sharpening is is not to overdo it if we go too much it actually becomes slightly crunchy looking and unnatural and will introduce quite a bit more noise so it's a fine balance for me 40 is almost always enough and sometimes i'll even dial that down alright so how do we know what's causing our soft shots i think the important thing is is to test your camera and lens and the best possible scenario to see what is achievable with your kit how do you do that will you approach a bird that's going to let you get close so it could be a seagull it could be a duck in my case it was this double banded plover let me get really close i was shooting a couple hours after the sun came up so i had lots of ambient light i've got a shutter speed over 6 40th of a second so a nice high shutter speed the iso is quite low so under 800 have it on a tripod focus on the bird take a burst of shots theory this is the best you'll ever get so if your shots are soft in this scenario that is you can't take any sharp shots i suspect there's going to be a major calibration issue if it's a dslr or there could be something faulty going on because you should be able to get sharp shots doing this however if i'm brutally honest i think the majority of soft shots are user error and not a fault of the camera and lens i know for me personally the majority of soft shocks i take because of me not because of the lens and the camera and i just hope that this video gives you some comfort knowing that bird photography is hard soft shots are normal and we all get them but by shooting in high burst rate high shutter speed keeping it nice and stable you know defocusing refocusing by doing all these things will increase your keepers and hopefully you'll get nice lots of nice sharp shots that you're happy with so i'd love to know if you get soft shots let me know in the comments if you take them what causes them what you do to avoid them i'm sure plenty of other people would love to hear what strategies you implement to get nice sharp shots i hope you've enjoyed this content if you like this video give it a thumbs up subscribe if you want to see more of these videos and of course a big thank you to the members that support my channel directly if you want to support the channel have a look in the description below i really do appreciate it helps me make more of these types of videos so until the next one take care bye for now and see you later all right so what shutter speeds would i suggest all right so what's the all right so what's so what's so all right so what's okay so should it be so what shutter speeds would i recommend to minimize what shutter speeds would i recommend to minimize motion blur and camera the camera has a little you

Channel: Duade Paton

Views: 52,929

Keywords: Canon R6 Review, Canon mirrorless cameras for wildlife photography, Bird Photography, Bird Photography Tips & Tricks, Canon R6 for birds?, Canon R6 photography tips, Canon RF 800 f/11, Canon RF100-500 f7.1, Canon RF Telelphoto Lenses, Canon Zoom Lens For Wildlife, How to improve image quality, how to improve your wildlife photos, How to take better photos, Wildlife Photography Tips, how to take photos of birds, Blurry Photos, Soft Shots, How to fix blurry photos

Id: TLQVrSMoCvQ

Length: 19min 53sec (1193 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021