Blurry T1i picture, advise please

iancrowe wrote:

A few things.

Image 1:-

The 75-300 is soft when shot wide open (F/4 at 75mm).

It has no image stabilisation and therefore you should stick to a shutter speed of at least 1/(2 x focal length). In this case focal length is 75mm so shutter speed should be kept above 1/150s to avoid blurring from camera shake.

The 75-300 is also soft to very soft above 200mm and needs to be shot at somewhere between f/8-f/11 to get decent images out of it. If you got £170 ($200) to spare it would be worth your while replacing the 75-300 with Canon's EF-S 75-250 IS lens. This will give you much better image quality and the benefits of image stabilisation.

I concur with these comments. Just a small correction, it's the EF-S 55-250IS.

You are letting the camera decide on which auto focus point to use. Not too much of a problem here but camera selecting auto focus has a nasty habit of selecting something in the foreground and locking onto it instead of the intended subject. Learn to select a focus point rather than leaving it up to the camera (See page 66 in the manual).

Image 2:-

Nothing wrong with this image. If you look closely the girls face is in excellent focus. What you are seeing is the effects of a shallow depth of field. In this case the camera is focused on her nose. Given the conditions (I'm guessing you were standing about 4 feet from the little girl) with the lens set at f/7.1 and 29mm focal length your depth of field will be about 19" or roughly 8" in front of her nose and 11" behind. This is why the doll is starting to look soft and the pillar behind her is blurry. If you want more of the scene in focus then you have to stop down to about f/16.

If you (as OP) want to learn more about DOF, have a look at dofmaster.com

Ian