How can I make my photos sharp? - Part 3: Choosing the Right Aperture

If you have not try different apertures on the same subject, you owe yourself to have some fun with it.

If we have high enough shutter speed, at given subject to camera distance and focal length, the aperture dictates the look of a photograph.

In a well lit environment, preferably outside, set your camera to Aperture Priority mode. This way, we don't have to deal with the slow shutter speed. Take three shots from the same spot, say 5 feet from the subject, focusing on the same subject without changing zoom. For learning purpose, we use focal length 50mm or higher. First shot, use F2.8. Second shot, use F5.6, third shot, use F8. As the numbers go up, the apertures get smaller. F8 is smaller aperture than F5.6.


You will see that the depth of field is different for each photo, meaning the blurriness of the background will be different. F2.8 will have the blurriest background.

In most situation, you may want to have the large apertures so that the subject is separated from the background. However, when you want to have more than one person or if you want the background to show up clearly, you would want to use a smaller aperture.

Aperture makes photography fun! Experience its magic by giving it a try!

How can I make my photos sharp? - Part 2: Shutter Speed Rule of Sum

As we all know that shutter speed plays an important role in the sharpness of the photos. Moving subjects require much higher shutter speed than still subjects. However, most people probably don't know that how fast shutter speed an image needs also depends on focal length (how much you zoom in), direction of the movement of a moving subject, how close you are to the subject, if you can hold the camera steady and if you have a lens with a image stabilization built in. I know, there are a lot to think about before you press the shutter!

To keep things simple, we are going to assume that you have a child posing for you at 7 feet away as shown in the image above. We also are going to assume that you are using a 50 mm prime lens without image stabilization built in. In this case, you would want to have the shutter speed to be 1/50 second or faster. If you have a long lens and you zoom in at 125 mm, you would want to use a shutter speed of 1/125 second or faster.

You see, the rule of sum is that the shutter speed is best to be faster than 1/focal length.

The more you zoom in, the higher shutter speed you need.

In bright sunlight, shutter speed is normally not a problem. But in the low light situation, you may have to adjust the aperture and/or ISO to increase the shutter speed. In other cases, you may want to use tri-pod or flash. We will talk about these in later posts.

How can I make my photo sharp? - Part 1: Focus

We all have taken many blurry photos unintentionally. So how do we avoid that? There are many factors to be considered when making sharp focused photos, and we will break this topic into several parts and write about each part in the next few weeks.

First, we have to learn how to focus. There are many different ways to do this, but this is the simplest and most dependable way I know. Please keep in mind that this is for modern SLR users - I have no clue how to take great photos with point and shoot cameras.

First, make sure your camera is not in automatic mode (The green rectangular mode)

Then, change your camera focus point to center focus.

Then focus on the point that you want to focus on, for example, people's eyes.

Then, press the shutter half way to focus

Then, recompose to have the scene framed properly

Finally, push the shutter all the way to take the photo

Take a look at this sample image - the focus was intentionally set on the ice cream.

Give it a try!! Please feel free to ask any questions! Don't forget to click on the link at the bottom of the right column to subscribe to this blog to get once a week updates.

Start the blog!!

Hi everyone,

We are hoping to use this blog to bring you some straight forward pointers for you to take better photos.

We will try to update this blog once a week, so please visit here often!

--Mei