We all tend to fall in love with something that we’ve created ourselves, but be sure to get past that and to always look at your photos critically. It’s important to not settle when it comes to the quality of your photographs, and that’s especially true for SHARPNESS.

Remember that an image will never be sharper than it is the moment it’s recorded on your camera’s sensor. Photo-editing programs can impart blurring to a sharp image in seconds, but don’t make the mistake of believing that the opposite is also true! The so-called sharpening functions on photo-editors depend on optical illusions that involve darkening dark pixels and lightening nearby light ones, but TRUE sharpening of blurred images requires knowing what pixels SHOULD have been recorded in the original scene, and that’s not likely to be possible any time soon. No, there’s no substitute for getting sharp captures in the first place.

The tiny viewscreens on the backs of our cameras are wonderful improvements over the days when we had to wait to get our pictures back from the developer to know how they turned out, but don’t trust that you can always see well enough there! Make it a point to never pass final judgment on how sharp an image is until you’ve seen it on the big screen of your computer, and then zoomed all the way up until you can see the individual pixels, and then back the zoom off just a little. If your nearby subject is a person for example, and you can see their hair, you should be able to see each INDIVIDUAL hair, and each one should be sharp–sharp enough to see the point of a tack in fact, or as photographers like to say: TACK Sharp!

There are a few things that can rob your pictures of that kind of sharpness, and it’s important to know how to identify and to avoid or manage each one. Here’s the list: Number one is FOCUS BLURRING… that can be caused either by a failure to focus properly, or by a depth of field that’s too shallow. Number two is HIGH ISO NOISE, which isn’t really blurring, but it can certainly rob an image of sharpness, and it’s often mistaken for blurring. And number three is MOTION- BLURRING, that can be caused by movement of either the subject, the camera, or both. We’ll return to discuss focus blurring and high-ISO noise a little later, but let’s cover motion-blurring now:

Here’s the most important advice for getting sharp images of all: If you don’t own a tripod, buy one today and begin to use it. True, the use of tripods isn’t always practical or even possible, but this much is certain: The more disciplined you are about using a tripod, the sharper your images will tend to be. It’s better to buy a good tripod than a cheap one, but any tripod is better than not using one at all. If you can’t use a tripod, try to find a substitute – like resting your camera on your camera bag or steadying your hand against a doorframe. But when you can’t do that and HAVE to shoot “HAND-HELD”, remember that increasing your shutter speed is the key to keeping motion-blurring from ruining your pictures!

SHUTTER SPEED is your camera’s MOTION BLURRING tool. Sometimes motion-blurring is a good thing–for example when you want to convey the speed of a fast-moving bicycle. But more often it’s a flaw in our pictures that’s caused by carelessness, and that should be avoided at all costs. Motion-blurring is especially prevalent when shooting in low-light conditions when the camera is doing everything it can to let in MORE light to accomplish a good exposure. Shutter speed is just one of the three ways it can accomplish that, but it’s the one that carries the greatest danger of ruining your picture altogether. Some photographers are lax about shutter speeds, reasoning that a slight case of motion-blurring isn’t really all that bad, and that it’s a trait that we should accept in our pictures. DON’T BE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE! It takes just a little more effort to avoid motion-blurring in our shots altogether, and it’s worth it. Look at it this way: If you shoot for excellence every single time, you MAY fail sometimes and end up with a few mediocre pictures. But if you NEVER shoot for excellence, then ALL of your pictures will likely be mediocre, and several of them will be ruined altogether.

We just mentioned that low-light conditions invite slow shutter speeds, but there are two other motion-blurring factors that we also need to watch: One is the SPEED of the movement itself. Consider birds’ wings for example: Sea gulls fly with much slower wing motions than hummingbirds do. To freeze a sea gull’s wings in flight, we might need a minimum shutter speed of about 1/200th of a second; but for the wings of a hummingbird we’d need something closer to 1/4000th of a second!

The other thing we need to be aware of is how much magnification our lens is providing: As we magnify the subject, we also magnify movements, and faster shutter speeds are needed to freeze that movement. We’ll cover lenses in more detail later, but it’s important to say this much about them now. If you’ve ever tried to look through a telescope at a distant star by holding the telescope in your hands without the help of a tripod, you know that it’s almost impossible to even keep the star in the field of view! Because camera lenses provide a wide range of magnifications, there’s a formula that you’ll need to memorize and apply as part of your ongoing motion-blurring management strategy. Magnification in cameras is expressed as LENS LENGTH, or FOCAL LENGTH, and is measured in MILLIMETERS. The longer the lens, the greater the magnification. Keep in mind that if you have a zoom lens, the actual length of your lens BODY isn’t what we’re talking about. As you twist the lens to zoom, notice which number your indicator on the outside of the lens body is pointing to. THAT tells you the focal length that your camera is set to, and it’s the one that should govern your shutter speed decisions:

Here’s the formula. You may want to jot it down and repeat it to yourself until you’ve memorized it completely: For HAND-HELD SHOTS, your MINIMUM shutter speed is the reciprocal of your lens length, but never slower than 1/60th of a second. Now if math isn’t your subject, a RECIPROCAL of any number is simply the fraction made by putting a “1” over that number. In our case that means that if the length of our lens 100mm, the minimum shutter speed that would safely prevent motion blurring when hand-holding the camera 1/100th of a second. For a 250mm lens it’s 1/250th of a second, and so forth. Keep in mind that these are MINIMUM shutter speeds, so if your camera meters the scene and comes up with FASTER shutter speed, that’s perfectly fine! Remember also that if the speed of the motion is unusually fast, as in the case of the humming bird’s wings, your shutter speed may have to be even faster!

The second part of that rule – the part that says that “in no case should it be slower than 1/60th of a second – is because many lenses are well under 60mm in length, and experience has taught us that people can’t hold still enough to prevent blurring with shutter speeds slower than 1/60th. You may hear disagreement from some photographers who feel that they can hold cameras more still than most, but camera manufacturers build 1/60th into cameras as a minimum shutter speed when shooting in the automatic settings, and so should you when taking creative control for yourself in the PSAM modes. Keep in mind that this whole discussion about shutter speeds and motion blurring applies only to hand-held shots, and to tripod shots where the SUBJECT is moving, such as children playing or trees being blown by the wind. If your tripod is locked down tightly and your subject isn’t moving at all, then shutter speeds become irrelevant where blurring is concerned.

Back to the mode dial now. It’s time to bring all this together as we introduce the PRIORITY settings: Shutter and Aperture. Recall that in Program mode, the camera is deciding these two settings for you. In full manual mode you’re making both of those settings decisions yourself. Can you guess what happens in the shutter priority and aperture priority modes?

Let’s say you’re standing in front of a waterfalls and have the idea that you’d like to intentionally blur the water to create a “wedding veil” effect that you’ve seen others do. You know that you want a slow shutter speed to do that, and let’s say that you don’t care about the aperture or ISO settings this time — except that you do want a good exposure that’s not too dark or too bright. The SHUTTER SPEED is your PRIORITY in this case. By selecting S from the mode dial (or Tv on some cameras – Time Value: It’s the same thing), your camera responds by asking what shutter speed you want, and you dial that to let’s say, 1/4 of a second, which is a fairly slow shutter speed – so you’ll need to be on a tripod. Now when you meter the shot and the camera reads the light in the scene, it starts with the shutter speed you’ve chosen, and calculates the correct aperture for that shutter speed automatically! If you also left ISO in auto, it will decide that value for you, as well.

Many photographers do all or most of their shooting in the priority modes, because it allows them to control what they need for the shot they have in mind, while at the same time depending on the camera’s powerful metering and internal programming to fill in the blanks for them automatically.

Capturing sharp pictures should be every photographer’s constant goal. Deliberate blurring is all right, provided that it’s truly deliberate, and not an excuse for poor camera skills. Ignore the voices telling you that you can “always fix blurring it in post processing”. Even if you could fix un-sharp pictures in a photo-editing program, do you really want to spend your editing time fixing badly

shot pictures? Or would you rather spend time ENHANCING pictures that were shot well in the first place?

An image’s SHARPNESS is one characteristic that will never be better than it is the moment it hits your camera’s sensor. So my advice is to always TRY to get it right in the first place, by using a tripod whenever possible, and by faithfully watching your shutter speeds for all the rest.