Help! Soft pictures! Cause?? Indian or arrow?

Hey,

Just got back from a trip to montreal with the wife and I can't say I was too pleased with the results of my pictures. I think a lot of them are soft and slightly blurry. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

I am shooting with a Canon 40d and the Tamron 28-75 XR Di.

Here are a couple of sample photos. Neither of them are great shots but I chose them because I think they are softer/blurrier than they should be. What could be the cause?

Picture 1:

are you using a tripod? anything under 1/60th is tough to get sharp handheld...

freeski99 wrote in post #10245224
are you using a tripod? anything under 1/60th is tough to get sharp handheld...

No tripod. I always sorta figured things out using that 1/focal length formula. Is hand shake the reason then? I figured, broad daylight, those pics should come out tack sharp.

Looks like camera shake. Your shutter speed is too slow, you need boost the ISO up to get a faster shutter.

HERE is the math

#1 just suffers from a great deal of bloom due to that giant chunk of blown out sky... IOW, just poor light quality.

In photo 1 you have to point to the sky, adjust the exposition and reshoot? Right?

pipegarcia wrote in post #10245639
In photo 1 you have to point to the sky, adjust the exposition and reshoot? Right?

You'd never be able to get the entire dynamic range in one shot with a "high," hazy sky like that Vs all that foliage.

It would probably be "acceptable" at a stop and a half less exposure from what's been posted but (and I'm guessing here...) you'd need to cut that sky by something closer to four stops or more really get all the detail in the clouds.

Tailor-made situation for an exposure blend or even a multi-frame HDR project.

Thanks for the feedback. The sky was completely blown out in the picture but does that affect sharpness as well? Look at the street sign, should be sharper than that right?

The picture with the window would fit within the focal length calculation but it's still a bit blurry. Camera shake?

kevinng828 wrote in post #10245248
No tripod. I always sorta figured things out using that 1/focal length formula. Is hand shake the reason then? I figured, broad daylight, those pics should come out tack sharp.

you have to take the 1.6 field of view crop factor of your 40d in account when using that formula.

so for a shot at 30mm you would need at least 1/48 shutter speed, which will round up to about 1/50 or 1/60 to be safe.

kevinng828 wrote in post #10244276
Suggestions needed!

sharpen

It's really hard to tell from these size images whether they're sharp. You might try posting a couple of 100% crops of things like the street sign or the window screen if you want people to be able to assess these better. As others have noted, the lighting will cause issues in the first image, and a slow shutter speed with a non-image stabilized lens may also cause some blurriness.

Up your shutter speed. Doesn't matter if it's the middle of the day or not- if you're not rock-solid you'll never get a sharp picture hand holding at 1/30th or 1/50th. It doesn't take much movement at that slow a speed to ruin the pictures.

Are you using center point focus, or are you letting the camera choose?