Tell me what you think (focus and soft pics)

Didn't put this in the critique section because this a technical question.

I took a couple pics last night of my son for some Christmas cards my wife and I will be making. Our house does not have great lighting (for taking pics) and I have no studio lighting.

The pics were taken with my XSi and my new Canon EF 50mm F/1.8 II aka the Nifty Fifty.

It seems like in most of the pics, the camera focused on the wrong thing, maybe. Like say in the first pic, I wanted to focus on his face, well it looks like the focus is on one of the light wires.. Or is the pic just soft all around? I can't seem to get this thing sharp...

Any suggestions? If you need more info just ask.

F/1.8, 1/125 sec, 800 ISO, at 50mm

1. It's softer looking because you are shooting at 1.8. It's a very thin DOF. Looks like you focused on the nose as that seems the sharpest plane. If you go down you can see things that are in the same plane as the tip of the nose is also sharper. I'm guessing you used center point AF and the nose is right in the middle of the frame.

1.8 has a very shallow DOF @ 50mm that close up.

2. Photobucket degrades quality of the picture making it softer. I suggest using flickr.

3. This should be posted in the "critique section" and not the general PT

That would make sense lol... Sorry I'm new to the technical aspects of photography.

I didn't want to post it in the critique section because I wasn't asking to be critiqued, I was asking for technical assistance.

With those shots you could have used f/2 or f/2.2 and still kept a good shutter speed. Sometimes it's better to shoot at ISO1600 and f/2.8 then have everything blurred out.

What focus mode were you using? One shot, Ai Focus, servo? That could make a difference.

What focus point were you using? You do NOT want to use "ALL FOCUS POINTS" because that just says to the camera "I don't care where you focus...." YOU need to explicitly set the focus point.

Also, based on "Our house does not have great lighting (for taking pics) and I have no studio lighting. ", you really can't expect much in terms of photographs. Photography is ALL about light, so a wise investment for next year will be a hot-shoe flash (such as the 430EXII).

I can't see your exif data, but I am going to assume that the shutter speed was a little on the slow side. It really looks like some camera shake there.

^ F/1.8, 1/125 sec, 800 ISO, at 50mm

Shutter speed is too slow, it's underexposed, the lighting isn't good, and the DOF is way too shallow.

If you had a hotshoe flash, you could have stopped down to f/4, kept the ISO much lower, and have a properly "lit" photo.

Also, if you use "one shot" focus mode, it is easy to move back and forth a little between the time you focus and the time you push the shutter button. When I use "one shot" up close, I lock the focus, but before I finish pushing the shutter button, I wait until whatever I was focusing on gets sharp again (I wobble around like the old man I am). It's a technique I developed shooting macro in the days of manual focus lenses, but it applies pretty universally.

I don't see any evidence of camera motion. I just think it is a missed focus point, very shallow depth of field, and no lens is at its best wide open. Flash would have ruined the feel of these, in my opinion.

egordon99 wrote in post #9128377
^ F/1.8, 1/125 sec, 800 ISO, at 50mm

Shutter speed is too slow, it's underexposed, the lighting isn't good, and the DOF is way too shallow.

If you had a hotshoe flash, you could have stopped down to f/4, kept the ISO much lower, and have a properly "lit" photo.

Those settings should work fine. Just move the control for the focus point so that the red square on top of the subject's eye is the one that lights up when you focus. Or focus manually.

Rick "who uses a single focus point, usually the one in the middle, and uses single-shot mode with AF-lock to allow focusing and then recomposing for the shot" Denney