Noob in Barcelona

Took this in Barcelona. Aside from obvious focus issues, what should I do when I retake this? Taken on a Rebel XT with a crappy Quantaray 100-300 lens. Didn't have a tripod the first trip out, but I'll definitely have one the second one. Thanks in advance.

At 300 mm you need a shutter speed of (1/300) x 1.6 crop factor, or roughly 1/500". So, your shutter speed is appropriate.

I have no idea why it is not sharply focused.

I also wonder why there is a sliver of pure white in the upper right portion of the frame.

The cropping task that you have given yourself is asking for trouble. It is very difficult to avoid having things right at the edge of the frame that will never be exactly right. You might as well just try to get more of the context into the frame and deal with it.

Could the lens be the reason why the photo isn't in crisp focus? I was thinking that that was the issue because it doesn't seem like any of the original is in crisp focus. Otherwise I'd think it might be aperture, but this seems like either shaky hands or lens. Honestly nothing from this lens seems to be in good focus.

Thanks for the advice about the cropping, I was thinking the same thing. Part of the problem that I had was with the original the way it was. I'm fairly certain that the white in the top corner is an artifact from the rotation that I had to do. I cropped and then rotated rather than the other way around, which was a mistake.

Any other advice is very welcome.

Ah, yes - rotation will do it when you are just a little sloppy about dragging the marquis. I'm sure that's all it is. We all do it

Haha I think I figured out why the picture didn't come out well. Something to do with there being a very not clear glass cover over the lens that was on there when my dad loaned me the camera. We'll see how this goes later.

It doesn't take much sharpening in CS3 to make that shot really crisp.