Photography: Why Your Photos Are Blurry

So you have just got your new 35mm camera - It was almost a thousand dollars or something comparable, so you figure it will most definitely take great pictures. Running around your living room, you take a few shots just to see the wonderful picture quality of your precious new baby. You take maybe ten or twenty shots and go to your computer, transfer all of them over and cannot stop yourself from diving right in to see the new golden exposures that lie on your hard drive. The first picture begins to load and your heart starts pounding faster and faster, you just cannot take it anymore! It finally shows up and your heart sinks to the bottom of your stomach. The picture is so blurry that you assure yourself it must have been a shot taken by accident in-between planned shots, so you click to the second picture - Blurry. Third picture - Blurry. Fourth, fifth, all the way up to the tenth or twentieth picture - All as blurry as can be! But you saw them on the LCD screen and they looked fine, how could this be?

Camera LCD Screens

First thing is first - Camera LCD screens are small. So small that they can make one of the blurriest photos you've ever taken look as clear as a desert sky. In order to see the true value of your photo's clarity, you will need to use the zoom feature on your camera and inspect it at a closer distance. If all looks well upon this closer inspection and the result of your photo still looks blurry, there may be an issue between the transferring process from camera to computer - Consult a local camera repair shop if you believe this is the case.

Shutter Speed

If you are in an indoor location with low light, and you've got your camera set to Auto on every option, there is a very high chance that your shutter speed is lower than 60. If you go any lower than 60, all handheld shots will almost always have some sort of motion blur. The lower you go in shutter speed, the more exposure you give to the sensor - More exposure means more time, and more time means motion blur of moving things. The higher you go, the quicker the shutter will work. The quicker it works, the less time it exposes light - The less time it exposes light, the more clear focus you will get. The catch 22 of the whole situation is that the more exposure you give (lower shutter speed), the brighter your image will be. The less exposure you give (high shutter speed) results in a darker image. This is where ISO speed comes in handy, to bump up the sensitivity of the film or digital sensor so that even a quick exposure (high shutter speed) will get a sufficient amount of light in order to make your photo properly exposed (not too light, not too dark). You can also use aperture to compensate for light loss but this will, in turn, make your depth of field much more shallow.

In Conclusion

All in all, always remember that if you're in a low light situation, it is always good to be creative with your shots. Using an on-camera flash can be good for snapshots but to make your photos look much more professional, it is wise to first and foremost look for natural sources of light and make use of them. If you absolutely must use an on-camera flash, you can always use other attachments to make the light softer - Resulting in a much more natural looking light that will make your photos not only look a lot more nice but a lot more professionally impressive.