C&C, Please

[Firepower]

Rookie here. Would appreciate some feedback on this pic, looks to me like the front of the boat is not as focussed as the stern. Thanks!

http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/1606/picture46011pf7.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

[chauncey]

It's not, I can read the numbers on back, but not on the front.

[Firepower]

It's not, I can read the numbers on back, but not on the front.

What could I do to correct this, if I want sharp focus throughout?

[tonydee]

It's hard to say. Your shutter speed of 1/200th of a second seems fast enough to minimise issues due to camera shake (even if you forgot to turn IS on, and given the longest focal length for your camera is equivalent to 140mm on a 35mm camera and you weren't using that as your shutter speed of f/5 is more than the maximum at that focal length of f/5.5). Still, it's remotely possible that you twisted the camera as you pressed the shutter button.

Other possible reasons: for a Powershot A570 at aperture f/5 and assuming a distance from the boat of 8m your Depth Of Field should keep everything from 5.2 to 17m well focused (see http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html). If you were actually further away the DOF would simply be greater.

ISO160 might well be a bit noisy on a point-and-shoot, and that can translate into apparent lack of sharpness after jpeg encryption and noise-reduction software's got involved. It could even be that the image is quite busy, and the JPEG software's reacted to the lower contrast lighting at the front of the boat by allocating less bits to encode the detail, reducing sharpness. But the PILOT writing doesn't seem particular sharp either, and black on white is about as high contrast as you can get, so I don't really believe this explanation.

After that, I'd ask if the camera's good enough: is this a crop? You can generally expect a crop to have less sharpness than an uncropped image resized to the same pixel dimensions....

Well, no other ideas come to mind right now....

Cheers, Tony

[Firepower]

Hi Tony, thanks for your reply and insight. Its quite possible the camera moved as I pressed the shutter. I'll also try turning down the ISO. The image does have a lot going on, but hasn't been cropped. But I'll try your suggestions and see what occurs.

[kirkt]

It also appears that the image could use a little more contrast - maybe the camera's metering was trying its best, or there was some haze, or the light was falling in a certain way that flattened the image a little. Bump the contrast and add a little sharpening and you will probably get a much crisper image with more saturation in the darks and better definition in the edges (like around the white letters on the red field and even in the "PILOT" dark letters on the white field).

Kirk