Sharpness masterclass

Get pin-sharp shots every time with these essential techniques and hardware tips. Jason Parnell-Brookes is your guide.

- Jason Parnell-Brookes

How many times have you carefully set up your composition, then dialled in the aperture, shutter speed and ISO to get the exposure spot on, only to realise when you zoom in on your shot that your subject is a little soft? It’s happened to all of us photographers, many, many times over. Ensuring your images are as sharp as possible is all about persistence and practising several key techniques that will ensure consistency. In this piece, I’m going to outline a number of steps you can take to make your images sharper more frequently and highlight some essential camera features that will help to banish the blur.

Portraits

Before we concentrate on anything else, the first step towards sharper shots is to be aware of what needs to be in focus, and by how much. When photographing live subjects such as people, it’s best practice to focus on the eyes. That’s because, as a viewer, this is where our attention is first drawn. Likewise, if the subject isn’t square-on and one eye is closer to the camera, the viewer will look there first, so this should be where we set our focus. The next step is to determine how much needs to be sharp – that is, how great should our depth of field be?

As we know, depth of field is dependent on how wide or narrow our aperture is. To increase the depth of field, we narrow the aperture and vice versa. Interestingly, focal length also plays its part in influencing depth of field – the longer the lens, the shallower the depth of field. For example, if shooting a portrait on an 85mm lens, we’ll need to take into account the shallower slice of focus this provides and adjust our aperture accordingly.

Landscapes