sharpness

How to Fix Blurry Pictures and Take Tack Sharp Photos

Let's consider a situation. You went out for a photo shoot with your trusty camera or phone. On location, all the photos looked sharp on the small screen and when you returned to base and opened the photos on your computer you found some photos had missed focus. Worse in some photos the entire image seemed shaken and out of focus.

How Much Does Lens Sharpness Matter?

Many of us enjoy quality. Be it a car or a lens, there's a pleasure in using quality things. And in the case of lenses, how perceivable is the quality of the images captured?

If Sharpness Truly Mattered, Cartier-Bresson Would Be a Joke

While teaching a recent workshop, I joked that street photography was the only genre where people would buy $3,000 worth of cameras and lenses and then deliberately use them to make out of focus, grainy, imperfect images. This led to a pretty interesting discussion about the merits to imperfection.

Sensor Size Comparison: MF vs Full Frame vs APS-C vs Micro Four Thirds

JP Morgan and Kenneth Merrill over at The Slanted Lens have put together an in-depth sensor size comparison that will definitely spark some conversation. They've compared medium format, full-frame, APS-C and Micro Four Thirds, in a side-by-side shootout—taking identical photos and making large prints to see how the image quality and dynamic range compares across formats.

An Ode to Vintage Lenses and How I Stopped Giving a Damn About Sharpness

As with a majority of newbies to photography, the obsession with gear and chasing the newest toys proved to be irresistible to me. I spent far more time reading reviews, comparing charts, watching youtube videos, and looking for deals than actually going out and shooting.

Hello. My Name is Bob Locher, and I Am a Pixel-Peeper

From Wiktionary: Noun pixel peeper (plural pixel peepers) (idiomatic, photography) "A person who carefully scrutinizes a magnified digital photograph in order to evaluate resolution and image quality."

Why and How to Calibrate Your Lenses for Razor-Sharp Autofocus

When we finally pluck up the courage to purchase an expensive lens, we expect them to be perfect right? Unfortunately, no matter how good the lens is, there are always going to be minor differences when we attach it to our specific camera.

The Best Aperture for Landscape Photography

The question “What aperture is best for landscape photography?” is often asked in various online forums. While there isn’t one “correct” aperture, certain scenes benefit from using a specific one. For standard landscape photography (excluding night photography, macro photography and other niches), the optimal aperture for front-to-back sharpness lies within f/7.1 to f/13.

6 Reasons Why Your Photos Aren’t Razor Sharp

Picture this: you come home after a great day out photographing and you’re excited to look through all the beautiful images you’ve captured. However, after importing them you realize that they’re all garbage because they’re blurry.

Nikon 180-400mm Review: A First Test and Sharpness Comparison

So, here’s the story: Nikon announced its new 180-400mm f/4 lens, and I’ve been more than a little curious about it. However, I’m not 100% sold on it just yet, so I decided to rent one and give it a whirl for a few days and share what I’ve discovered with you.

iPhone 7 Plus vs $82,000 Arri Alexa

A few months back, a viral video showed how the iPhone 7 could (in some respects) hold its own against a $50,000 RED Weapon. This side-by-side comparison of the iPhone 7 Plus against an $82,000 Arri Alexa is a bit more... what you expect.

How to Read MTF Charts for Camera Lenses

Purchasing a new lens for your kit can be an expensive endeavor and the more information you know before making a purchase is always useful. You may have noticed that lens manufacturer sites tend to include what is known as a Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) chart.

Impressive New Smartphone Software Can Turn a Blurry Mess Into a Clear Shot

Besides sensor size, quality glass is the other major hurdle that smartphones need to overcome if they ever want to truly compete, quality-wise, with their bigger more capable brothers.

But since attaching a 500mm lens to a smartphone looks... well... kind of dumb, the folks at Canadian startup Algolux are taking a software-based approach and producing some truly incredible results in the process.

Simple Tip for Getting Tack Sharp, In Focus Landscape Photos Every Time

For landscape photographers, getting your entire scene in focus while keeping things as sharp as possible at the same time can be a challenge.

But if you follow the simple technique laid out by photographer Joshua Cripps in the tutorial above, as he puts it, it becomes "as easy as manually removing a corn syrup-based artificially-flavored confectionary product, from the infantile grasp of a newborn Homo sapien."

DxOMark Reveals Which Lenses Perform Best on Nikon’s D800E

It’s fairly well-known that, when it comes to capturing images, more important than almost any camera body is the glass being put in front of it. However, there are times when your camera body plays a vital role in determining the quality of the image rendered by said glass.

To prove this and also help show off what glass performs best with a particular body, DxOMark has published a series of articles that break down what the best lenses are for the Nikon D800E.

Perceptual Megapixel: Lens Sharpness Boiled Down to a Single Number

Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) charts are a very commonly used tool in the photo industry for measuring and describing how sharp a particular lens is. However, it's a system that is largely enigmatic to those outside the realm of optic experts and camera gearheads.

For those of you who don't want to learn how to read MTF charts, camera gear testing service DxOMark has announced a new metric that boils a lens' sharpness down to a single easy-to-understand-and-compare number: the Perceptual Megapixel.

Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 Mark II Trounces the Mark I in Sharpness

Despite its girth, weight, and price, Canon's original 24-70mm f/2.8L is a highly-regarded general-purposes lens. When the followup Mark II version was announced back in February, the higher-price tag, similar specs, and lack of IS had many photographers scratching their heads. Then the reviews started coming out.

Lens Diffraction and How It Affects Your Photos

Really more useful for landscape and macro photographers who are going to be shooting through very small apertures (f/22 and above), this video from FStoppers explains what diffraction is and how it can affect your shots. The trade off, as they explain in the video, is between a large depth of field and a sharp image; and the trick is to find your "sweet-spot."