Photos with my D3100 never perfectly sharp

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bex31

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Becky
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Hello,

I am new to this forum but you all sound so knowledgeable so I wondered if I could ask your advice? I have a Nikon D3100 and a 50mm 1.8g lens. I mainly take shots of my children and am always trying to get better. The thing that really gets to me is the shots are never really clear, there is always a slight blur. I put the focus point on their eye or between their eyes and it never comes out like I want. Any advice. I usually try and set the camera to 2.2 and a shutter speed of 1/100 with a 200 iso, usually outdoors or in my living room by the big window. Where am I going wrong!!??

Many thanks in advance for your help x
 
Hi,

Welcome to the forum. I will try to help, but still learning the ropes myself.

Have you got some examples of photos? it will be the best way to see what's going on. It may be that the shutter speed is a tiny bit too low, so rather than blur the photo looks a little soft???
 
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An aperture of 2.2 is on the low side and if you are fairly close to your subject it will not give much depth of field which is why a lot of you image will not be in focus.

Increase it to 5.6 or more and see how the photos look. Your ISO will need to go up or shutter speed down but for outdoor shots you shouldn't run into any problems as shutter speed should still be high enough
 
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For taking photos of people the lowest safe shutter speed is about 1/125. I would pump up the ISO so you're getting about 1/200 second and see if that makes a difference.

Phil
 
Thank you so much for replying and for your advice! This is so stupid but now do I upload a photo on to this site? x
 
I also have a D3100 and f/1.8 50mm lens, and I'll say that at anything closer than about 10 yards a wide aperture focused on the nose will be sharp for just the tip! As someone else said, it doesn't give much depth of field so you don't need to be very far away from the focal point for it to start to blur. See if you can get some shots at a shutter speed of 1/125 and an aperture of closer to 5 or 6 and see how the blur looks then.
 
1/100 sounds quite slow, I would expect a blur unless it was on a tripod but maybe I'm just a shakey mess when holding a camera.
 
1/100 is not slow when using a 50mm lens (unless you had a few pints too many the night before) but it would be a touch slow if the children are moving.

1/100, 2.2 and ISO 200 don't add up to an outdoor shot though either and shoudl be able to use way more than 1/100
 
I think seeing some of the shots is going to be key here. :)
 
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