Take SHARPER Images with ANY camera! No More BLURRY Photos! Tips for Success

[Music] we all want them razor sharp images and when we zoom into them we see amazingly sharp crisp fine detail and all around amazing image quality but that doesn't always happen does it often times we zoom into our favorite image of a shoot and it's just not sharp so frustrating that's what i want to share with you today my most successful tips and strategy to avoid blurry images and help you on your way to only taking razor sharp images going forward so let's jump right in tip number one use the right gear and set your expectations accordingly unfortunately with bird photography the better gear that costs a lot of money usually takes the better and sharper images as well so for instance this 600 millimeter prime lens in my background there will take much better images than like a 70 to 75 to 300 millimeter zoom lens so this is what i mean when i say set your expectations accordingly don't compare like a cheaper lower end zoom to big prime lens the big prime lines will always have the sharper images with the better image quality that's just something to keep in mind another common mistake i see is people using extenders on cheaper zoom lenses generally i wouldn't recommend using extenders on any zoom lens because they heavily degrade image quality some zoom lenses like this 100 to 500 do okay with a 1.4 extender or even the two times extender holder i would really really recommend against using two times extenders on zooms and lastly what i often see as well when it comes to gears people listening to the guy who sells them the camera in the camera shop and they usually try to sell you a cheap like 50 dollar uv filter that you put on front of your lens to not scratch it or for whatever reason really but i always say that's the first thing you should throw out or not buy ideally in the first place because they just don't really have any benefit and they severely sometimes degrade your image quality as well you have like a two three four thousand dollar lens and you put like a fifty dollar piece of glass right in front of it and then you're shooting through this lower quality glass so that's really something that i wouldn't recommend and i don't see any benefit of having those uv filters in front of your zoom lenses tip number two use the tripod or learn the right hand holding technique this is an interesting one because i could tell you now about you should put your arm in here to have another third point of contact put your other arm right up here press your camera against the face and then have a lot of contact with your body and have a nice stable stance for your camera when you're hand holding or put one arm on a steady surface like this table or if you're on a tripod put one hand on top of the lens or if you're using a gimbal head like me put the hand on the base to stabilize your camera and that all is important and works well but if you're not following tip number three and that's using the right shutter speed all this talk about the technique won't really matter because all technique does is remove the camera shake and removing camera shake is important so learn the right technique that i just showed you but when it comes to bird photography in particular we're also dealing with another kind of blue and that's motion blur because our subject is moving so we're not having a fast enough shutter speed we can have the best technique in the world the most stable tripod and we still will only get blurry images because birds are just constantly moving all the time aren't they so for me personally i feel like for bird photography the minimum shutter speed i really like to go to is a 400th of a second and don't get me wrong even at the 400th of a second i get lots and lots of images with motion blur but that's kind of my go to shutter speed in kind of more low light situations because at least in a burst i will usually get a few sharp images with that shutter speed generally speaking when it comes to shutter speed there's a nice rule of thumb that your shutter speed should be one to three times your focal length at minimum so if you're shooting with a 400 millimeter lens for instance your shutter speed should be at least a 400th of a second that's kind of the safe zone the lower end of the safe zone but now you also have to think okay that should probably now reduce my camera shake or make the camera shake go away because the shutter speed is fast enough to freeze that but we still have to deal with motion blur so the faster we anticipate our subject to be for instance a bird in flight or you are stationary in the birds taking off in those cases you will have much much much faster shutter speeds probably at least at 2 000 to 4 000 of a second as a minimum to freeze that actions what we also have to consider with the emergence of more and more really high megapixel cameras like the r5 45 megapixels a1 45 mega or 50 megapixels a7 r4 even like 61 megapixels or so is that the higher the megapixel on the camera the more chance there is for motion blur or camera shake in your images as well higher megapixels are definitely more unforgiving and 100 require faster shutter speed so for instance you might have an r6 with 20 megapixels and you will be able to have lower shutter speeds and handheld longer exposures or have less motion blur at the same shutter speeds compared to an r5 for instance where i would recommend using a bit higher shut up speed simply because more megapixels are more prone to creating some sort of motion or blurriness in your images so that's something to definitely keep in mind but what can you do if you're in a situation where you just can't avoid having a low shutter speed because it's just too dark outside in these cases all you can do is pretty much spray and pray if you have a camera with an electronic shutter like a lot of the mirrorless cameras now i would recommend using the electronic shutter because it will reduce the vibrations inside the camera and then you just have to fire away and hope that one out of 20 images will be sufficiently sharp and that's throughout the years the best method for me how to get sharp images in low light focus nicely electronic shutter and then just fire away and hope that one of the images from your series from your burst will be sharp so how can we actually get fast enough shutter speeds in the field for that it's important to remember that our exposure consists of three elements aperture iso and shutter speed so naturally to have a fast shutter speed we have to manipulate the iso and the aperture and that brings me to my tip number five use the right aperture for the job one of the most common mistakes i see people make in the field is that they just blindly shoot wide open all the time and personally i think that's just bad behavior because most lenses have a significant increase in image quality when you stop down slightly and that's especially true for the lower end zoom lenses let's say like 150 to 600 that's wide open at f 6.3 will be significantly sharper at f 8 or f 9. so if you're having a lens like this and you're always shooting at f 6.3 you're actually giving up some image quality and some sharpness by simply not stopping down i'm not against shooting wide open at all i think it's a fantastic creative element if you use it the right way i just think always shooting wide open without thinking about shooting wide open or why you're shooting might open is not great in the field because you're just giving up image quality you can shoot wide open creatively if you want your foreground blurred and your background blurred and just a bird standing out more and i think then it's a fantastic tool but generally speaking i think stopping one to two stops down is just much better in the field because it gets you more sharpness on the bird and increases the sharpness and overall image quality of your lens and your lens is not only just sharper but also because more of the bird will be in focus when you're stopping down your images will also appear sharper simply because more of the bird is in focus for us our eyes it doesn't look very nice if only the bird's head is in focus and then the rest of the body is already fading away if the majority of the bird's body is actually not in focus your images will simply look not as sharp because for our eyes the majority of the bird is simply not sharp some of you might say but what about the background doesn't that get more in focus if i stop down and absolutely it does so there's always a bit of a trade-off to be made do i want more sharpness on the bird or do i want a more blurry background and that's why i personally like to position myself in situations where i have a distant enough background so that i can shoot at f 8 or f 11 get the whole bird in focus and get a nice smooth background another reason to stop down is when you're using extenders with extenders it's really crucial that you stop down at least one stop when using them wide open most extenders are just not that great even on a big prime lens you can see a slight difference from shooting wide open or stopped down with the extenders so if using extenders stopping down is pretty much a must in my eyes so now that you know that i like high shutter speeds and don't like to shoot very wide open where does that leave us well with tip number six and that is don't be scared of using high iso one of the most common mistakes i see people make in the field is that they use too low iso which then results in two low shutter speeds and to compensate for that they usually shoot wide open so you get like the worst of three worlds you have low iso wide open and low shutter speed yes your image might not have much noise but it's very likely to be blurry and not as sharp as if you had shot at a higher iso and more stopped down so there's really no need anymore these days to use iso 200 400 i'm not even talking about 100 because i think high iso like 800 1600 even 3200 on a lot of these modern mirrorless cameras are very easy to use in the field and i always say a noisy image is much better than the blur image because i can easily remove the noise in a program like dxo pure raw without much trouble at all but if the image is blurry there's no way to fix it so personally for me i much prefer to have a noisy image i need to work with than having no image at all or blurred image of course there are cameras where you can't go as high with your iso and then you might have to shoot a little bit more wide open or have slightly lower shutter speeds but generally speaking most cameras are very capable now these days and of course iso in the end is a bit of a trade-off because the higher your iso sharpness is suffering a little bit as well so i'm not really recommending that you just go out there and shoot at ice or 12 800 on sunny days now but i think within reason the best thing to push when it comes to getting fast shutter speed is your iso so my simple rule for setting the right iso is pretty much where i say what's the minimum shutter speed that i need usually four hundredths of a second what's the why most wide open aperture that i want to shoot at usually 6.3 or 7.1 and then i just set my iso accordingly and sometimes i can be sixty four hundred twelve thousand eight hundred what do you guys think about my tips in regards to aperture iso and shutter speed have you been shooting wide open with lower iso let me know in the comments now we're moving on to tip number seven setting up your auto focus for success in the past with dslr cameras there was actually a lot of things we had to consider when it came to auto focus and a lot of times if we buy a new camera and a new lens they wouldn't perfectly work together because they had to be micro adjusted first so you could have the case that you have a new camera a new lens you focus on a certain spot but the actual sharpness in the photos will be in front or behind that spot and you needed one of these micro adjustment tools that would help you to actually adjust where the camera focuses and get it to the point that if you focus on a certain spot that spotted sharp so you needed one of these tools or you had to send it to shop and this was actually quite painful so i'm really glad that we can throw that away now because with the new mirrorless cameras you don't need to do any micro adjustments anymore how amazing is that with mirrorless cameras and their different auto focusing systems micro adjustments are thing of the past and almost all lenses will work perfectly focusing right on the spot with the new mirrorless camera so this is something that i'm really happy about because i don't have to worry about this micro adjustment anymore that took up so much of my time this is also another reason i think while a lot of people report that with a mirrorless camera they're getting more sharp images than they have with the dslr cameras simply because the mirrorless cameras always focus on the right spot will with a lot of lenses especially zoom lenses give many people better results than they had with their dslr camera so that's another thing to look forward to when you're getting into the world of mirrorless cameras let's talk about autofocus settings for a little bit because there's the common misconception that the autofocus should be quite aggressive in searching for new targets because birds are flying fast or moving quickly through the frame but i think the opposite is actually true what i like to do for my focus is that once it acquires focus i like it to be pretty calm and not very jumpy in trying to stick to the one subject that i focused on rather than trying to look for other subjects for instance if the bird's flying in front of me there's like a tree going through my image i want the camera to actually stay on the bird so in these cases for canon cameras i like to have my autofocus on case one and then set the two things that i can change there to minus one and i've gone very well with that autofocus setting on my dslr cameras and i'm also using the same setting on my r5 cameras now when it comes to how you focus on your camera i think that doesn't necessarily affect sharpness even though i'm a big fan of back button focus because it gives me more control and especially with dslr cameras i think back button focus helped a lot because you could use the ii server mod as a one-shot mode and you were able to do focus and recompose because with the dslr cameras this was one of the things we had to do because the autofocus points would not go throughout the whole viewfinder so you only had a few points in the center of the frame and if you wanted to focus on the bird you had to focus on the bird's head and then recompose your shot and there was obviously a margin for error because if you focus on the bird's head and then the bird moved and then you took the image you might end up with an autofocus image this also doesn't happen with the mirrorless cameras anymore because a lot of them have the automated tracking and also have auto focus points all the way to the edge of their frame so with these two tools we now can have an autofocus point either automatically by the camera or you can move your autofocus point to the bird's eye which in both cases allows you to keep your composition and you don't actually have to move your camera around compared to dslr cameras so i think this is another reason where mirrorless cameras have a big advantage because they're just not as prone to errors another strange thing that seemed to happen with dslr cameras a lot especially on the 5d mark iv is that you focus on something take images and then just none of the images were sharp because the autofocus just hit something else but it made it look to you like it was on the bird so to circumvent that problem with dslr cameras often would focus take a burst of images and then refocus take another burst of images refocus take another burst of images because at least one of those bursts the camera would have focused perfectly on the right spot the only thing i recommend when using a camera like the r5 that has automated tracking is that you don't focus too early with the dslr cameras we would usually just start focusing the moment we see the bird because we want to get the focus on the bird with with the cameras with eye checking i've noticed that you get better results if you let the bird come into the frame kind of wait half a second until the camera can kind of figure out where the bird's eye is and then press the focusing button if you start focusing before the bird's head is actually visible sometimes the animal eye or the focus will jump on like the bird's body or the background and you might miss the shot tip number eight shoot in the right conditions and just accept that sometimes the bird is just too far away if the birds 20 30 50 meters away from you just just nothing you can do you won't get super crisp super sharp images simply because there's so much air and dust and whatever else in between you and your subject it is severely degrading image quality so generally speaking the closer your subject is to your lens the better your image quality will be secondly one of the most common reasons that people have very unpleasant blurry looking images is heat haze and the name might be a bit deceiving because heat has can happen in winter it can happen in summer it can happen anytime anywhere basically i've had heat haze on cool days when shooting peregrine falcons at the cliffs because the sun is shining onto the cliffs making them quite warm and then the cold ocean is actually creating a difference in temperature that then makes the air sort of flicker flimmer and i just can't take any sharp images maybe 1 in 50 images will be sharp because essentially the air between you and the bird it's like crooked and bent it's hard to describe but in this situation there's just nothing you can do either than accepting it or waiting for the temperature to cool down a bit or even out so there's not any more this heat or difference in temperature coming up that is then visible in your images but now that we've talked about conditions that can ruin your images what about conditions that can actually help you to take sharper images generally speaking nice and bright overcast or early morning light but not too early morning light or late evening but not too late evening light is probably the best conditions to get the best nice sharp images so on a not too hot day maybe half an hour after sunrise you will probably have the prime light that's strong enough lighting up the bird giving you all the beautiful details and allowing you to create nice and crisp images that we all want tip number nine don't screw it up when editing your images and this tip actually goes hand in hand what i said before about the distance because if the bird's too far away it's too far away don't just try to excessively crop into an image because the more we crop into an image the less sharp it will look and the more noise will appear in the image simply because we are zooming in more and more and more to that image so excessive cropping is definitely one of the reasons why people often feel like the images are not sharp but the images are actually sharp or as sharp as they can be but the bird being too far away and then cropping a lot is what creates subpar image quality so when the birds further away i would probably start to think of ways of composing it differently in my frame so that i might get a more pleasing wider composition just cropping in really tight to bird that's too far away will usually not really result in the images that we want and certainly not in nice and sharp images secondly when it comes to editing we have to remember that sharpening your images when editing doesn't mean you're actually making your images really sharp if you have a soft image you can apply a lot of amounts of sharpening to it and it will still not look right because sharpening doesn't really make it sharper it just applies a lot of contrast and creates some artifacts and halo so aggressive sharpening will still not really make you images that are not sharp sharper personally for instance i don't ever really apply sharpening to my images the only time i apply sharpening beyond the input sharpening is when i do prints then i do a little bit more sharpening on top but most of my images i have not really applied any sharpening to so i would always be quite careful when it comes to sharpening my images because i think excessive sharpening makes an image look worse rather than better or sharper and lastly tip number 10 let's talk about something not many people talk about but that i think is crucially important in making your images stand out and that is perceived sharpness i've photographed houses professionally for many many years i've dealt with many many clients that over the years there has been a common theme that i also find in my bird photos now and that is people say something doesn't look sharp but they actually don't mean it's not sharp they mean it doesn't look sharp because it has a color cast there are certain colors that our eye wants to see in a certain color our eyes prefer if whites are white grays are gray and blacks are black so if the black has a blue cast and the white has a yellow cast and the gray have like another color cast the image doesn't actually look right or sharp to us but it's not actually that the image is not sharp but it's that the off colors make the image look not sharp to our eyes and so this is something that i often work on in my images and that i teach you in my master class that's linked down there in the description how you can make your images look absolutely amazing and crisp so by simply cleaning up some of these colors and focusing on problem areas in your images you can actually make images look sharper simply by tweaking the colors and not applying any sharpening or doing anything else have you struggled with sharpness in the past what do you think is the main reason that you have blurry images let me know in the comments also please make sure to give me thumbs up for this video and share it with your friends because liking and sharing my video really helps the algorithm to know that it was good content and it should be shown to more people so even more people can take nice and sharp bird images also please make sure to subscribe to my channel and i will see you in my next video very soon bye

Channel: Jan Wegener

Views: 146,468

Keywords: bird photography, australia, jan wegener, birding, birds, equipment, exposure, manual mode, aperture, depth of field, wildlife photography, nature photography, bird photography equipment, bird photography gear, birds in flight, Canon EOS R5, animal eye AF, animal eye autofocus, R5, canon mirrorless, 100-500, RF 100-500, Canon RF 100-500 L IS, Sony A1, rolling shutter, blurry images, take sharp images, sharper images, sharpness, ISO, Noise, noise reduction, high iso, shutter speed

Id: AoSNt8jqIdo

Length: 24min 15sec (1455 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021