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DSLR Noob

T

The Donut

2[H]4U
Joined
Jan 28, 2003
Messages
3,122
Hey,

I inherited an older DSLR from my father, an Olympus.

I'm completely new to photography and tried to take some closeups (With the "flower" icon enabled.... yeah noob, see) of some fish that were relatively dormant.

Every single picture was blurry with both auto and manual focus, I was steady. Are there some quick tips any seasoned photogs could send my way to get me up to speed?
 
Yep - you came to the right place. I don't have a lot of time at the moment to explain, but the top of this thread has some very nice detailed info from another member here.

To answer your question as quickly as possible, fish tanks are generally kind-of dark, so I'm guessing the camera had to leave the shutter open for a really long time to capture the scene. Even though you thought you held it steady enough, you (or the fish) probably had enough movement to blur the image. One way around this is to use a faster shutter speed. Instead of the "flower" setting on the camera, try and get it into shutter-speed-priority mode - this will probably be an "S" for shutter or "T" for time. Make sure the time is set to around 80 (that's 1/80th of a second) or higher. Hopefully then the camera will adjust the rest of the settings to brighten up the image without having to leave the shutter open for a long time.

The other possibility is that the camera just wasn't focusing properly. The lens that came on the camera may just not be capable of focusing on something as close to the camera as you were trying for. The auto-focus may have been having trouble with that low-light scenario as well. The only real way around this is to practice a lot with the camera, both in auto-focus mode and manual to become really familiar with the capabilities of the lens: what's the minimum focus distance, and how much depth of focus you will have at close ranges etc. If you can find the manual for your lens, it probably has a table with all this data in it. Be sure to do your practice focusing in an area with bright lighting (preferably outdoors), as this will make it a lot easier to get the hang of it at first, and you can rule out a lot of other factors that may have come into play.
 
Post some samples with EXIF data so we can see what's going on
 
You typically want a shutterspeed at least 1/focal lenth to avoid camera shake, and even that won't do it sometimes. In poor lighting conditions, or with large aperatures, that can be very tough to acheive. You don't need to be moving much at all to induce blur.

While EXIF data would help us, you were shooting in an automatic mode, I suspect that madFive is right, and that you either had too little light or were too close to your subject for your lens.
 
KollunZ said:
You need a Macro lens to take close-up pictures.
Click to expand...

A macro lens is generally the best option, but not the only one. You can also use close-up adapters to give one of your existing lenses macro or semi-macro capability, or there are a number of telephoto lenses that can do semi-macro. Lastly, there's the reverse lens trick. However, I doubt his fish shots were close enough to warrant any of these.
 
Auric said:
A macro lens is generally the best option, but not the only one. You can also use close-up adapters to give one of your existing lenses macro or semi-macro capability, or there are a number of telephoto lenses that can do semi-macro. Lastly, there's the reverse lens trick. However, I doubt his fish shots were close enough to warrant any of these.
Click to expand...

You can definetly do those, but nothing beats a prime macro lens in sharpness. and in my opinion it's much more practical than buying an adapter or setting up reverse lens.
 
Or even "understanding exposure" by Brian Peterson.

You say you were "steady" but you weren't. Until you have a lot more practice and time using the camera you won't realize how much you are really moving the camera. Tripods exist for this purpose, you can sort of half-assed do it by bracing the camera body against a tree and holding your breath.

Even so, thats not the cause of blurry pics. Likely you are too close for the lens minimum focus distance, which for most general purpose lenses is at least 2-3 feet away.

Using the built-in camera modes is for grandma and snapshooters with deep pockets. A nice rule to remember is to never take a shot at a shutter speed that is greater than your focal length. Thus if you are shooting at 100mm, never take a shot slower than 1/100. If at 300mm (great zoom) never greater than 1/300. It's not a hard and fast rule, but one that is quite painful when you are using a slow kit lens. This one rule will cut out a chunk of newbie blurry pics.

Also your aperture controls depth of field, and your viewfinder shows the wide open aperture. So when you actually take the shot your DOF is probably different. Some cameras have a DOF preview button. Since autofocus is dodgy sometimes, you may not get what you thought was in focus actually in the picture.
 
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