What am I doing wrong?

Hello, I was out shooting today with my 70-200 F4L lens, I havent used it much so I am still learning. I am getting a lot of soft images, I dont know what I am doing wrong. I have performed focus tests and it seems to be spot on, so I dont think its that. Images taken at a shorter focal length usually look great, is it just because I am shooting at 200mm?

Here is some examples:

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that looks pretty good to me. 100% crops always look soft, but you never view an image at that scale so its no problem. IMO you've got a good lens you've just gotta get yourself closer to the bird:P

the first one does look more blurred than the second though... thats prob due to camera shake or something.

Most images can use a little post sharpening.

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hi...
You shot in JPG and with your parameter setting it will come out "soft".
Try to increase your sharpness and contrast parameter.
And like kprince said you could do some unsharp mask with PS.

good luck

It does seem a tab bit soft to me. Two suggestions come to mind. If I made that shot I would be using center focus only and a tripod (or monopod). try it, see if it makes a difference.

Fuzzy bird, fuzzy picture. Makes sense to me. Don't we have a center focus thing on our 10D's? Would that have helped? The metering seems to be awful sometimes for small far away objects that move at 200 meters away. With that extent of cropping, you did just fine.

Hi Shniks,

Did you hand-hold these? Even though you shutter speed was up at 1/400 (which *should* have prevented camera shake being registered) there's still no guarantee. The whole of the image seems a little blurred which would lead me to think the camera wasn't quite steady enough. Even a heartbeat can make the difference if your not on a tripod. I'm not sure that centre-point focusing is the issue (if you get my meaning) as there doesn't seem to be a sharp spot.

Maybe gettingh a little closer and trying to make the subject fill the frame more would help. Also, the lighting seems a little on the flat side.

Nice bird though!

Your bird is talking up a small portion of your frame. If you were to have it fill up 30% of your frame the clarity and detail would be great. The less pixels your subject takes up, the less detail can be seen.

Get closer, or get more mm.

Either that or try stopping the lense down a couple more notches to increase the DOF a little.

That is all.

No matter how good a lense is, if the subject isn;t close enough you won't get that much detail. I can confirm however that burdy there looks quite good to me.

i think your first shot is camera shake the branch is not sharp anywere but sharper on the second shot ,also as other's have said get closer.
Rob.

Opportunities may slip through your fingers in a heartbeat. Shoot first and ask questions later. A bit of PS postprocessing can go a long ways.

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Thanks for the replies! I will try shooting with a tripod and stop down to see if it helps, and maybe I am expecting too much detail from such a long distance. I have a feeling it acutally was camera shake, looking back the ones I took at 1/2000 came out really well. This lens is too heavy for me it seems, I need to get used to it.
BTW great PP from kprince and hjoe, I'm going to give it a go too, I originally thought these images were unsaveable.