Toddler portraits, Sharp enough?

I'm tripping on the sharp aspect. Should I change the mode on my camera to get the focus more even? Right now I'm trying to keep it on the eyes, but then around the edges seem blurry :-/

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If you want her ears to be in focus too, you can stop down the lens. (larger aperture value)

edit: the new forum software won't let me see your exif data. What aperture and focal length did you use?

I think I added it in now.. can you see it?

You were lucky to get a toddler holding still for 1/20 sec. A much faster shutter speed will help your keeper rate. Raise the ISO as needed. Raise your aperture value from f/4.5 to f/5.6 or more to increase the amount of her head that's in focus. Again, raise your ISO as needed.

mike_d wrote in post #17488760
You were lucky to get a toddler holding still for 1/20 sec. A much faster shutter speed will help your keeper rate. Raise the ISO as needed. Raise your aperture value from f/4.5 to f/5.6 or more to increase the amount of her head that's in focus. Again, raise your ISO as needed.

This.

There are 2 schools of thought about DOF with portraits (well, there may be more, but 2 is enough for this discussion) - trying to get the whole head in focus (nose to ears, mainly), or having quite narrow DOF to accentuate a part of the face, usually the eyes (or the nearer eye for those shots not front on). If you are going for the former, as implied by your earlier post, then you will need a narrower aperture such as f8 (assuming identical framing), which implies either slower shutter speed or higher ISO.

As Mike said, toddlers generally need faster than 1/20 to freeze them (good work on nailing your model still in these images!), so the most likely result is that you will need to increase your ISO to compensate.

Alternatively, if you have a flash, you can increase the amount of light available, which will let you shoot at f8, faster shutter speeds, and low ISO.

Oh I see. So these would be considered acceptable, just a different style.

Still trying to get my head around all the different components, but it's starting to make sense..

Holy Moly. Those are great considering your shutter speed. The general rule is try to keep your shutter speed (SS) at the same as your focal length. So if you are shooting at 50mm, you will need at least 1/50th, and I am not familiar with the Nikon bodies, so if that is a crop, you would want a shutter speed a crop factor times the focal length. So for the rebel line which is 1.6 crop factor you will want at least (1.6X50) 1/80th. But to stop motion, you will sometimes need to go up. To stop motion of someone sitting, I usually try to aim for 1/100th.
You seem to have shot these at ISO 100, you definitely could have bumped the ISO higher and increased your SS proportionally. Since the SS was so short, I am guessing you were in a somewhat dimly lit room. So raise the ISO, get your shutter up to 1/100th at least and if you want just the eyes in focus, your aperture is fine. If you want more in focus, jump up a bit. Being that you are using a relatively wide lens, you get more DOF that say a longer lens. So F5, F5.6 or so should be just fine to get you to her ears as in focus front to back.
You will find that even increasing your shutter speed will give you sharper images since even the tiniest bit of movement will look like it is out of focus (OOF), but it really just movement.