How to Get More Detail in Your Photographs!!! 1. Focus carefully – Today’s cameras do a wonderful job of focusing automatically, but often enough, the autofocus point is not exactly where it should be, resulting in a slightly out-of-focus image. This is especially apparent in photographs with a shallow depth of field where correct focusing is super-important. Double check your camera’s focus point before you click. 2. Don’t stop-down your lens fully – This means that you should set your camera to photograph with your highest aperture number (smallest aperture size) minus 2 stops. The small aperture size gives you great depth of field, yes? So why not just just use the smallest aperture? Because of a phenomenon called diffraction – read the complex explanation here. 3. Don’t open-up your lens fully – Don’t use your lens’s widest aperture unless it’s a professional grade lens. Most lenses have a sweet-spot. A range of apertures that produce the best resolution images (in terms of edge sharpness, not number of pixels). In regular consumer grade lenses, these are usually NOT the smallest and largest apertures. The same rule applies to Pro lenses too, but even at the extreme apertures, they usually produce better images than regular lenses. 4. Use a fast shutter speed – Often people find that their images are blurry even though they’re using a small aperture. Why? It’s most likely that either your camera or subject is moving, causing the image to move on the sensor during the time that the shutter is open. You can freeze your subject in the frame with a fast enough shutter speed. Usually a good guide is to use 1/’focal length of your lens X 2′. This means that if you’re using an 100mm lens, you should set your shutter speed at anything faster than 1/200th of a second to avoid shake. Depending on your subject, you may have to go even faster. 5. Keep the camera still, us a tripod – If your subject is not moving, and you have the leisure of arranging and framing your subject, why not use a tripod to ensure that no vibration filters down to the sensor? As an added benefit, you get to retain the exact same composition from frame to frame and make minute adjustments that would be difficult or impossible with a hand-held camera. 6. Shoot in sufficient light – Small aperture + fast shutter speed means that you need to have enough light to correctly expose the image. Take photographs in bright sunlight, halogens or off-camera flash strobes to ensure that the camera’s sensor gets enough light. 7. Do not use a high ISO – Depending on how you look at this, it may not make sense. I’ve been talking about high shutter speeds and small apertures, right? You need to use a high ISO to get there… right? The answer is: use as low an ISO as you can. Higher ISOs increase the level of noise that the sensor generates, degrading the quality and level of detail in the image as you go to higher ISOs. Stick to low numbers on this, and you’ll always get smoother images with more image detail. 8. Light from an angle – Angular lighting casts shadows, bringing out textures and giving the surface a more tactile quality. Most things look better when lit from an angle rather than straight-on. 9. Use the largest image capturing area possible – with dSLR cameras, this means use a full-frame camera or medium format camera. If you’re shooting film, it means use a medium or large format camera. More recording area automatically means that it can capture more detail. Think of the detail that can be seen in a miniature painting versus the detail in a 20ft giant of a painting. 10. Do not use a cheap lens – Expensive professional lenses cost an arm and then some… because the designers made sure they got it absolutely right. They picked the best materials, they combined these in the best way possible. They also picked the finest workers to build them. These do not come cheap. If you need a very high level of detail in your images you won’t be using a cheap-ass lens. The same goes for a filter.
Posted on: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 23:32:15 +0000
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