Mt ruapehu newbie landscape cc and help please

[petechewy]

I took those photos while on a sknowboarding trip. I had auto focus on and image stabiliser, but for some reason the image is not as sharp as I hoped. I tried to check the image just after taking them, but on the camera it's quite hard to tell.

wonder if i should use manual focus? If yes, whats the best technique to focus using manual as i seem to struggle a little with finding that exact focus.

lastly feel free to comment and critique these pictures, they were taken RAW with minimal processing. Cheers

[freo]

What was you shutter speed and aperture for the first one?

As for focus, if you had a tripod, I would put it onto f14 and focus bout 1/3 into the shot, around where the first white and read marker is on the side of the road. This should give good depth of field.

[petechewy]

Hey bud, the first pic was f29, 1/5s at ISO 100. i used a tripod and self timer with mirror lock up. i may add that the tripod isnt exact a good one as im new...
2nd pic was f22, 1/25s at ISO 200, it was hand held because we were late to the mountains and i didn't have time to use tripod. So i still used mirror lockup and self timing (just because it was in the morning and i forgot to turn the options back from the night before)