Season One
0002 Episode Two Blurry Images
Shooting sharp images begins with not having blurry images. Terry talks about what it takes to create images that are sharp including techniques for panning. Choosing the right shutter speed for the lens you are using.
Thanks for listening in today on the image light podcast. Are your wildlife photographs sharp? There are two things that the best digital retouching cannot fix very well, and that is a photograph that's out of focus or blurry. You have to get these things right in the camera. I see this all the time on social media. People are posting images that aren't sharp. Most of the time they're out of focus. Sometimes they're blurry, but either way, the human eye doesn't like to look at a photograph that is not sharp. That's the basis of why shallow depth of field images are so compelling.
The photographer is forcing the viewer to look at what they want them to look at. By making some parts of the photograph soft and some parts sharp that I will always go to the sharp section of a photograph. It's a great tool for photographers to have control over the viewer's eyes. However, the photograph is completely blurry or out of focus with nothing sharp to look at. No one wants to look at that image at all, not even for a brief second. so stop shooting blurry and out of focus images, and most of all, stop posting them on social media. No one wants to look at them.
In today's episode, we'll solve the easiest of those two photographic problems, blurry images. The blurry image is caused by one of two things happening during your exposure. Either your camera's moving too fast for the shutter speed you've chosen, or. Your subject is moving too fast for the shutter speed you've chosen . Needless to say, this all revolves around your shutter speed. The shutter speed is the part of the equation that intertwines with aperture and ISO to make a proper exposure. The standard-issue solution for blurry images is to shoot at one 60th of a second or higher. When you're hand-holding your camera. This is an overall good place to start, but like all simple solutions, they're easy to break. And in this case, making your handheld photographs at one 1/60th of a second or higher will not be a complete solution.
Let's go outside and do some test photography to see if we can help photographers stop shooting blurry images.
Since I live in the San Francisco Bay area, it's a short trip to find saltwater. The Bay is only a few minutes away in the Pacific ocean is only about 45 minutes away. So when you factor in Bay Area traffic, you're only three, four hours away from anything. I'm doing testing like this. I like to go where there's a concentration of seabirds. So down at the nearby Marina is always a good action spot with the sea birds coming and going. For starters, I'm using Nikon equipment. And for the first time, I'm shooting with a 24 to 70 zoom lens and I'm shooting at a 1/60th of a second at F/8 my zoom is out to 70 and I'm checking the sharpness of the images as I shoot.
The first shots are just of something stable like a post or a rock. I hold the camera, my left hand is underneath the lens and my right hand is free to move the dials around. And I've got the stability in my body too because I'm moving to the camera right next to my face. It's anchored against my face. And then I'm also bringing my elbows into my chest to keep a stable situation.
Now my feet are a little bit different. My left foot is pointing towards the subject. My right foot is perpendicular to it, so, as I'm standing there, I'm going to flex my knees a little bit so my body's kind of turned a little bit to the right and then twisted back forward to my subject. So this gives me a real stable shooting position. When shooting something stable, like a rock or a post or something along those lines, I can easily have that sharp at 1/ 60th of a second.
Now let's start with shooting some moving birds. The technique I like to employ when shooting moving subjects is panning. This is where I follow the moving subject in the viewfinder at the same speed as the subject, and I keep the camera moving even after the shots are done. If I do this properly, there's going to be much less dramatic movement as far as the subject in the frame.
Let me give you an example. If I stood in one place and shot a bird flying by the camera, keeping the camera steady, the bird would be in the frame for just a short second. But if I pan with the bird from start to finish of his flight, then the bird remains in the frame a much longer time, and you can experiment with this technique.
You might be able to shoot these subjects even slower than 1/60th of a second. This panning technique is used to sometimes make the background blurry and keeping the moving subject sharp. But I'll give you a little fair warning. This is a really fun technique, but you've got to do it a bunch of times to get it exactly right. So get used to panning, get the speed right. Follow your subject across and shoot as you go.. As I'm looking at these shots on the back of my camera, I'm noticing that some of the birds that are in flight are a little soft, so I need to adjust my exposure to gain a faster shutter speed.
I'm just going to dial that in. I'm going to put in a, we'll say a 1/ 250th of a second, and I'm going to adjust with my f-stop and my ISO. We'll try that again.
Looking at the back, that's a little bit better, but I think I still need to go a little faster, so let me get up to a 500th of a second. Here we go. And now that actually is pretty good. That's coming up pretty decent, but again, I'm using a 70-millimeter lens.
I'm going to switch it over to my 300 here. Now, this is a much longer lens, much more difficult to handhold. So what I'm going to do is attach a monopod onto the bottom of the lens to just help me with stability. I could handhold it, but you know, it would take a little bit of extra energy and I think it would be easier just to have it sitting on the post. You can find something to anchor it on, or you can use a monopod where you can actually attach it to your lens, and then you've got some nice stable support out in front of the lens.
One of the things I'm noticing is that because of my magnification, now my 1/500th of a second is just okay, it's not great. It's not super sharp. So let me try again and we're going to move this up to a 1/2000th of a second. Okay, so I'm doing a little bit better. Same technique. I'm panning with the subject as it moves to keep it in the frame a little bit longer.
I'm using the continuous autofocus to track that subject through the frame. So in this scenario, I'm finding that as I go up to a longer lens, I need to get a shutter speed that's gonna be conducive for that longer lens.
So the rule of thumb is a 1/60th of a second for handholding, but that's assuming using about a 50-millimeter lens. As you go up to a 300 millimeter lens, you need to shoot at least at a 300th of a second. I found that you probably need to double that, so you need to be at 1/600 of a second, or maybe even need to be even higher, and if I want to stop action like a bird flying, I'm not going to hesitate to get my shutter speed up to a 1/4000 even at 1/8000 to the second.
You can't do that by adjusting the F stop. And we also have that other trick where we can adjust the ISO, bumped that up as need be.
This is how I've solved this issue of blurry images. I've stabilized my camera by holding it properly or putting it on a monopod, you can put it on a tripod as well. And then stabilizing my subject by having a much faster shutter speed.
I'm shooting at a 4000th of a second, and that's going to be fast enough. No problem to stop the wings of a bird flying by, and you can even go up to an 1/8000th of a second to really get that really crisp sharpness.
When you start shooting wildlife, you really want to start with the sharpness of the blur in the photograph. Most important is making sure that you've got a shutter speed that is conducive to the subject you're shooting.
Now, birds, that's going to be the fastest thing probably you're going to be normally shooting. If you're shooting mammal wildlife, a lot of times they'll freeze while you're trying to photograph them, they'll freeze for just a second and you can shoot them obviously at a much slower shutter speed.
Now that we've discussed how to stop shooting blurry images, what about the times that you want some blur? You use a fast shutter speed to stop motion in your photographs and use a slow shutter speed to show motion. Just like in the previous exercise, using a slower shutter speed can show that the motion is happening in the photograph.
This is used all the time in photography, the night scenes of car tail lights, streaking through the image to show the motion of the cars. Almost always, this is done with one long exposure, several seconds long to show the passage of time and the motion of the cars. We use this technique of a slow shutter speed to photograph waterfalls blurred to show the motion of the water flowing through the scene.
Understanding fully what the proper shutter speed is being used can greatly improve your photographs.
Faster shutter speeds, STOP motion, and slow shutter speeds SHOW motion. When using a slow shutter speed, it's best to keep your camera on a tripod or at least a stable platform of some type. I also like to use the cable release so that when my camera's stable, I don't risk any camera shake by moving the camera by me pressing the shutter. Release stability is the key.
Expensive tripods work well at just about any height, but inexpensive tripods can work well only if the legs are not extended. The only downside to this is you have to work closer to the ground. So if your camera moves at all when your tripod legs are extended, shorten the legs to get more stability out of it.
Another trick that's used quite often is some sort of stabilizing weights. When my setup is near my car, I'll often use sandbags to help keep the tripod from moving. These will also help under windy conditions. Sand bags can be homemade or you can buy them at most professional camera stores.
I know that they have them online at BNH photo. The most popular ones are saddle style sandbags. These have a handle for moving them around and equal weight is distributed on two sides of the bag. They are, as you've already guessed, just canvas or corridor of fabric pouches that have sand in them to create the weight. You can also get shot bags. That they use lead shot or something similar from the hunting world to create the weight.
These bags range from a couple of pounds to up to 25 pounds. As you can imagine, the heavier the bag, the more stability it can bring to the tripod. The question always is, how much do you want to carry? I have found 15 pound bags be pretty easy to move around. If you're more of a DYI kind of person, you can use a gallon-sized jug like an old milk carton and fill it with water on the spot.
Many tripods have a little hook called a ballast hook. That's usually at the bottom of the center column of most tripods. From here, you can tie a small piece of twine and hang your water jug sandbag to pull weight down from the center of the tripod to help stabilize it.
You can also substitute an open bag and gather nearby rocks to fill the weight and do the same thing. When you do have the luxury of sandbags, I also put bags around each leg as it hits the ground to stabilize the setup even further. Once you have your camera on a stable platform in the form of a tripod that sturdy or weighted down, you are ready to shoot.
At this point. You can do whatever you want. All of the shutter speeds are available to you. Now, most cameras start at 1/8000th of a second and time to all the way down to 30 full seconds. The only thing stopping and will be the quantity of light that's available on that given shot. if it's a bright sunny day, you'll not likely get to set your camera too slow. Then your only choice is to add some neutral density filters to the front of the camera to cut the amount of light entering the camera. Now that you have the setup, go do some shooting.
I've used this technique to remove tourists from a popular spot while photographing in Ireland. I was at the Kylemoore, Abby in Galway County, and set up a shot from across the pond. The downside of this shot is there were a bunch of tourists milling around in front of the Abby. So in order to eliminate them, I took a shot at 30 full seconds at a very stable tripod, and I had to use a heavy neutral density filter to shoot at 30 full seconds during the day. But the results were great. Almost no one stood in place for a very long time. So they're all blurred they didn't even register on the sensor. The result was a shot where the Abbey looked totally deserted.
So get out there, do some shooting with fast shutter speeds to clean up the blurry image issue, and then go to the other extreme and create some shots that show motion. I stabilizing your camera and shooting really slow shutter speeds. there's an equipment list of most of the photography products used during this podcast.
I used a Nikon D5 with Lexar 32 gig cards. For lenses. I use a Nikon 24 to 72.8 zoom, the 70 to 200 zoom and the 300 f/2.8 prime lens. For support. I use the Gitzo G 1588 MK monopod fitted with a Wimberley mono gimbal head. All of my lenses have had the stock lens foot removed and replaced with an Arca Swiss design lens foot.
I use Really Right Stuff tripods, that way when I'm going to be hooking onto any item of my tripod or my monopod, I'm able to hook on quickly and easily all with the same connection, which is Arca Swiss. For my tripod, I use the Really Right Stuff. Carbon fiber tripod, series three. It's pretty lightweight considering how big and how sturdy it is. So it works really well for most of my photography needs. I also used an older version of the Nikon cable release. You can't get this one anymore, maybe on eBay or something, but a good cable release is definitely worth your investment.
Photographed at 1/5 of a second. Tourists moving around the popular destination. Kylemore Abby, Ireland.
Photographed at 30 full seconds, tourists are blurred from such a long exposure. 10 stop ND filter used.
After small amount of Photoshop work done to remove cars in the background.