lens help please

toxicris

toxicris

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chris
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Hi here goes
I am using a tamron 75-300mm 1:4-5.6 ld lens on my d80 I am very unhappy with the results, I know its a cheap lens.
All my photos seem to come out soft there is no crispness to them I have read loads on this forum and tried everything tripods gripping the camera firmly to reduce vibration, bean bags.
I have started using the lens at 250mm rather than at the max 300 but the effects are still the same soft out of focus pictures .
Now this is where i would like your help i have been looking at the galleries of other d80 users on here and the Sigma 170-500 lens seems quite popular does anyone have any plus or negative comments on this lens i will be using it primarily for bird photography.
or can anyone recomend another lens:thinking:
thanks in advance chris
 
Before offering any advice it would probably be a good idea to show us some samples of the images you are getting. THat was we can judge if the problem is lens or technique.
 
I took these on friday the 6th of febuary tripod mounted
Bright sunshine
AF Area single area
centre AF area normal zone

DSC_5080.jpg


DSC_5065.jpg


I took these as a test several people have made comments about my photos in need of sharpening so I have been trying to figure out why.
 
Do you sharpen them? Sometimes pictures at that size do not show the blur/problems. Can you blow a picture up to 100% and cut a relevant section of it out at the max size?

The pictures do not look too bad for a cheap high zoom lens if they are un sharpened at the moment.

What software do you have?..... Do you know what setting to use to get the best sharpened results?
 
Quick selective sharpen,

BirdNotme.jpg


And I ain`t no pp expert.
 
This a 100% crop of the first pic
100.jpg


I have cs3 but I am stumbling my way around it just now switched from paint shop pro and its a little confusing.:bang:
 
Richard Peters has an excellent sharpening tutorial on his blog;

Clickage.
 
What settings are you using ( aperture, speed, iso)
Allan
 
OK, they don't look bad!
Do you do any sharpening when you resize for the web? This may be the point - resizing for web looses detail so you usually have to run a bit of sharpening over the image before uploading.
Also, viewing at 100% magnification is rarely a good test (If you do this). I have been ain a position where I got a few comments on sharpness, started picel peeping my images and convinced myself I had a soft lens. In fact it was my resize technique that was not so good and my expectations of what 100% looked like was too much.

Let us look at a 100% crop of the centre of that image and see how it is.
 
aha, I see the crop. TBH that isn't bad
How much was the original image you posted cropped from original?
 
hi chris i,ve got the same lens and had comments on here about the softness so i,m looking for a better one to go on my d300" its all about the glass "they say :'(
 
:bonk:
 
dinorock said:
hi chris i,ve got the same lens and had comments on here about the softness so i,m looking for a better one to go on my d300" its all about the glass "they say :'(
Click to expand...


yeah been hearing that a lot of late so now I am on the hunt for some better glass.
Thanks to all who helped and that tutorial was very good :thumbs:
 
most pictures taken need sharpening to a certain degree, unless you shoot in JPEG and there are certain amount of sharpening the camera's cpu do, D80 doesn't have the best process for that.

But as you should shoot in RAW, the pictures will be slightly softer and you do need to sharpen them using your preferred methods as a matter of must-do. the 100% crop doesn't look bad at all.
 
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