Sharp shots are usually essential in photography. Well, ok I can think of several types of image where you’d want some sort of creative blur – to portray a sense of movement for example. But more often than not, sharpness is king.

So, do you need a tripod to obtain sharp shots? I originally started this piece on tripods and camera support but quickly realised that a separate article on tripods, monopods, beanbags and other camera support was required to do that justice..

This article is about maximising your chances of getting great, sharp shots hand-held.

Brace, brace!

A very often overlooked part of camera technique is how to hold the thing in the first place. Hold the camera to your eye as normal and put your right hand where it usually goes. The left hand is where I see a lot of people going wrong though. The best place for it is underneath the lens barrel with your elbow pointing down and into your chest / stomach. Tuck both elbows into your body and you’ve effectively braced the camera and lens against yourself, which will cut down on a lot of unnecessary vibration through the arms.

If you have the opportunity, you can also brace yourself / the camera against a tree or building or whatever’s around.

A recent trip to Costa Rica gave this position a really good workout. I took my Nikon D4 with a 300mm f/2.8 lens and that was what I shot almost everything with. I took a tripod and it came out for a few days but was quickly ditched in the rainforest because I prefer to have total freedom of movement. The D4 and 300mm was a fantastic combination: the D4’s legendary ISO performance coupled with the 300mm’s razor sharp shooting at wide apertures meant I could hand-hold in gloomy conditions.

What’s a good shutter speed to avoid camera shake?

It’s hard to recommend an exact shutter speed because some of us are more shaky than others! A tripod will disconnect us (the shaky thing) from the camera (the steady thing) so that the latter can take a sharp shot when the shutter speed would be too slow to hand-hold.

However, I must admit that I far prefer to shoot hand-held if I can get away with it as it allows so much more freedom, particularly if I’m following something fast moving like birds in flight. You can get a good idea of what will work hand-held by using a shutter speed that is at least as fast as the number of millimetres of focal length you’re using. Let me explain: if you’re using a 400mm lens, you need at least 1/400 sec to hand-hold.

That’s a nice simple rule for full frame sensors, but a lot of cameras have cropped sensors (so-called APS-C size) and this needs to be taken into account by multiplying the speed by the crop factor. Typical crop factors are 1.5x (most Nikon), 1.6x (most Canon) and there are others at 1.7x and even 2x and above. Taking Nikon’s D3300 APS-C sensor SLR as an example, our 400mm becomes 600mm (400 x 1.5). This means you’d need 1/600 sec to take a steady hand-held shot. There isn’t a 1/600 sec setting, so you’d have to set 1/800 sec.

Image Stabilisation

If your lens or camera body has image stabilisation (aka vibration reduction or optical stabilisation) built in, you can use significantly slower shutter speeds when hand-holding. The degree of stabilisation depends on the technology being employed and is usually quoted in ‘stops’. If you’re not familiar with stops in photography, for our purposes here it’s a way of expressing doubles of shutter speed where one stop equals double the speed.

So, if the amount of light available dictates a shutter speed of 1/100 sec but you have 4-stop image stabilisation, this is the equivalent of using a shutter speed 16 times faster, i.e. 1/1600 sec. It’s 16 times faster because each stop gives double the speed: 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 16.

Keeping with our example of the Nikon D3300 with a 400mm lens (effectively 600mm on a cropped sensor), you could actually just about get away with 1/50 sec if the lens has 4 stops of stabilisation. This make a massive difference.

Bear in mind though that this 1/100 might give you a sharp image of a static object, but 1/100 sec will rarely freeze the motion of any subject that is moving. So, there’s a big difference between overcoming camera shake with image stabilisation and having enough shutter speed to stop a moving object.

Image stabilisation often has more than one mode available to set. For example, there might be a ‘tripod’ setting, which optimises the stabilisation for the characteristics of tripod vibration. Some lenses have a mode that’s used while panning so that only one axis of vibration is cut out. My experience with this is that Canon’s lenses employ this second mode as an option, whereas Nikon claim their VR lenses automatically detect panning. Sometimes there’s an ‘active’ mode, which is used for very bumpy situations such as shooting from a moving vehicle.

Shooting from Vehicles

It’s not always humans that cause camera shake. Vibration from cars, boats and aircraft can ruin images. There’s a combination here of the movement of the vehicle as it travels and the engine itself causing a different frequency of vibration. The only way to get past this is trial and error, erring on the side of as fast a shutter speed as possible. I took a series of images of Victoria Falls from a helicopter and needed at least 1/1600 sec to avoid the aircraft’s motion softening the image. Image stabilisation can help of course, although I didn’t have it on the lens I was using in the helicopter. You can cut out some of the motion, by stopping the car or boat’s motor as you shoot. Although I wouldn’t recommend doing this with a helicopter!

Aperture and lens choice

Some lenses are inherently sharper than others. Prime lenses are usually better than zooms and professional lenses are sharper than consumer models. It’s also worth knowing that each lens has an optimum range of apertures where it achieves best resolution of the image, and therefore the sharpest shots. Lens characteristics vary considerably from lens to lens and there are reference sources where you can look up your own lenses.

In general though, the advice is to shoot with the lens stopped down two or three stops of aperture from the maximum aperture of the lens for optimum sharpness.

So, if you have a lens with a maximum aperture of f/4, the sharpest shots are likely to be had at around f/8 to f/11. With the exception of very expensive optics, most lenses are a bit soft at wide open aperture. That’s a shame because background blur (bokeh) is a lovely thing with a wide open lens.

Lens construction, materials and coatings are getting better all the time, but you should still be aware that always shooting wide open may not result in the best images. This is something of a kick in the teeth for anyone who needs to shoot in low light! In order to achieve the fastest shutter speed, it’s necessary to open the lens up to it widest aperture to let as much light in as possible. Such is life and this is one of the many compromises in photography.

My advice about lenses is pay as much as you can for the best you can afford. Unless you’ve been conned, an expensive lens will resolve light into sharper detail on the sensor at a wider range of apertures than a cheaper model.

An Aperture too far

Don’t assume that closing down a lens’s aperture to its minimum value (say, f/22 for example) will result in the sharpest images. Another factor comes into play when the hole that the light passes through gets tiny: diffraction. Diffraction is where the rays of light separate out as they emerge from a small aperture and end up arriving at the sensor at slightly different times as they fan out – the outer rays have further to travel. This spreads the light across more sensels (sensor pixels) than necessary and the individual light rays interfere with each other to create light and dark areas, effectively smudging the image.

I should also point out that if you shoot everything at f/22, not only will all your images have distracting backgrounds due to the large depth of field, but this small aperture won’t let much light in at all. In turn, you’ll need a slower shutter speed or higher ISO value (or both) to expose the picture properly, potentially introducing camera shake and image noise respectively.

Remember that a lens has a range of optimum apertures somewhere in the middle of its maximum and minimum apertures. This is usually between a couple of stops from maximum aperture and a couple from minimum.

Noise

You may already know that using a high ISO setting on your camera can introduce unwanted noise into the resulting image. It’s another photographic irony that increasing ISO in order to obtain faster shutter speeds and a corresponding reduction in camera shake can soften the image due to the amount of noise present. You’ll have to experiment with what you find acceptable for your camera, but you’ll find that after a certain value of ISO, the camera will record less detail and dynamic range and your pictures will need more noise reduction in post-production. And, you guessed it, noise reduction reduces sharpness.

Flash

If you’re concerned about noise in low light conditions, why not use a bit of flash? This will instantly alleviate the problem of noise and can also give you an effective shutter speed far greater than that indicated on the camera. How so? Well, in dark conditions, you set the camera’s exposure to deliberately underexpose whilst making the flash do all the work. In these conditions the flash’s duration is much shorter than the camera’s shutter is open and you’ll be able to freeze the motion of your subject at anything up to 1/38500 sec. I go into more detail on flash techniques in this post on photographing swallows.

Cleanliness is next to sharpness

It should go without saying that keeping the glass on the front and rear elements of your lenses clean gives light the most unobstructed path possible. I say it should, but I’m a bad example myself! Using a rocket blower and soft wipes as well as the occasional lens cleaning fluid is recommended. To a certain extent, shooting with a wide aperture ‘looks’ straight through a lot of dirt because the depth of field is so small and the focal point is pushed so far away from the lens. But it’s good practise to keep everything clean and anyway, as we discussed above, not all lenses can produce sharp images at maximum aperture.

The same goes for the sensor itself. I find that I can use products like the Arctic Butterfly and so on to remove a certain amount of the crap that accumulates on sensors, but every now and again I take my cameras to have their sensors professionally cleaned.

Dirty Air

The quality of the air through which you shoot can have an impact on sharpness, particularly if you’re shooting through a long lens which compresses a lot of space in front of you. It’s likely that if you’re shooting hand-held you’ll just shoot in whatever conditions you’re given, but be aware that the compression effect of long focal lengths will exacerbate the softening of an image. Haze, smog and any other atmospheric particulates can build up and have an effect.

Rapid fire

An interesting effect comes into play at slow shutter speeds and fast frame rates. If you have no option but to shoot at a slow shutter speed in low light, jack the frame rate up to its maximum, brace yourself as much as possible and take a series of exposures in quick succession. You’ll need to change the drive mode of the camera to continuous shooting.  It’s a phenomenon I find difficult to explain (because I don’t understand why it works!) but there’s a very high chance that one of the shots in the sequence will actually be sharp. Go on, give it a go.

And Breathe…

If you’re forced to use a slightly slower shutter speed than you’d like when hand-holding, pressing the shutter whilst breathing out in a long breath ensures that the movement created by breathing is controlled and steady and has less impact on shaking the camera.

The Eyes Have It

When we’re talking about sharpness, it’s rare for an entire image to be completely sharp and in focus across the whole photo. In fact, artistically speaking, you’d normally want to avoid this as it can confuse the message in the picture. Using sharpness to call a viewer’s attention to a particular part of the photograph is an important compositional tool and you should consider which part of the image needs to be sharp for this reason. The eyes in humans and wildlife alike are usually the most important part of a photograph to have sharp for two reasons: firstly because the human brain is wired to look for sharpness and will go for areas in focus before anything else; and secondly because eyes are what we look for to create a connection between us.

The lion at the top of this page is a good example of why only a small part of a photograph needs to be sharp: the eyes. Even a single eye is enough to make a personal connection to the subject of the image. The shot below of the seal’s whiskers shows when to break this rule:

Hyperfocal distance

Hyperfocal distance is one of those things that’s really only practical for static landscape type shots and not usually in hand-held photography. But you can maximise your chances of getting the best sharpness for the largest depth of field by focusing at or near the hyperfocal distance.

If you don’t have a lookup-table or smartphone app at hand to calculate this for you, a very rough guide is that about a third of the scene in front of the point of focus will be acceptably sharp and about two-thirds behind it. The actual depth of field depends on the aperture you’ve set and the focal length, but focussing about a third of the way into a scene is a good start.

Having said this, shooting hand-held is usually more about focusing on a particular subject (like an animal or person) and getting that subject sharp, rather than looking for maximal sharpness right throughout an image. I’ve just mentioned it here for completeness.

And finally…

Don’t get that hung up on sharpness! I hope the image of my youngest daughter laughing shows that sharpness isn’t always important to create an engaging image:

It’s an uplifting experience to be heralded into the office by two duelling robins, each belting out a bright song from a nearby tree, with me receiving a glorious stereo mix in the middle.

It’s not robins I have in mind this morning though. I’ve spent a good part of the summer with swallows both here in the UK and in France. Their antics – and even simple presence – is uplifting all summer long.

Firstly I’ll give you some of the finished pictures and then throughout the text I’ll explain how I achieved the shots and show you some of the behind-the-scenes setup.

Swallow challenge 1: Northumberland

Outside my office in Northumberland, there are little-used barns: ideal nesting places for swallows. Not surprisingly, the full title of these little aerial gems is ‘barn swallows’ and I spent many a day in June photographing them, largely inside a dark space getting progressively covered in bird poo. My gear – and indeed I – have not quite been the same since.

As you’ll see, the technical challenges of photographing flying swallows is not insignificant!

First fledge

I chose two nests and started watching the behaviour of the parents as they sallied back and forth to fetch insects for the chicks. Each of the two nests contained four youngsters – quite a squash in the small mud cup nests when they’re ready to fledge. The pressure eventually gets too great and parents encourage the chicks to attempt a maiden flight by singing from nearby. I watched as, one by one, all four chicks from one nest tested their wings by flying to their parents on a nearby banister in one of the barns.

Making barn doors

Once the residents of nest 1 had scarpered, I concentrated on nest 2, which was just above the barn door. This barn door is about 2.5m high. When I say ‘door’, it’s really just an opening, as it doesn’t have a door at all. I could see the swallows flitting in and out and pirouetting in the air to land at the nest, so I had a go at photographing the incoming birds as they entered the doorway. With laughably poor results! The camera autofocus and my reactions couldn’t cope with such fast flying creatures and there was surprisingly little light just where I wanted to capture the birds, requiring serious amounts of ISO increase.

This called for some sort of ingenuity. Enter Mr. Heath Robinson!

I realised I had to slow the swallows down, so constructed a timber door frame with translucent under-floor foam to block the path of the birds but let light through. Then I cut a hole in the middle so I could control where they would fly in. Around about this time, I took delivery of a new camera trap trigger unit and thought that was just the ticket. After a few tests (with the help of my eldest daughter pretending to be a bird) I realised that there were a number of technical challenges, not least of which was the fact that the object had to be precisely where the trap needed, otherwise it wouldn’t trigger. I also noticed that the battery consumption was high and that if I wanted to leave the trap for hours or even days, I’d need some sort of battery pack. I tried various sizes and eventually plumped for a leisure battery, which is a caravan / motor home battery (a bit like a car battery) that is designed for continuous low power, rather than the intermittent high power that a car battery provides.

Rigging this up on a horizontal pole across the hole in the doorway I hoped it would trigger when the swallows entered. I had the trap linked to my camera on a tripod, which in turn controlled two or three wireless flashes. To cut a long story short, this kind of, sort of worked. A bit. But not well enough.

All change

In the end, I realised I was going to have to press the shutter myself, but that I was definitely getting somewhere by slowing the birds down in the first place. Exchanging the translucent foam for black photo background paper, I re-made the door for a different look. This time, I wanted to cut out all stray light and let the flashes do all, or most of the work. Instead of using the trap, I stood behind the door on the inside of the barn with the camera pointing out of the hole. With wireless flashes on the outside of the hole and manual exposure and focus, I eventually got the shots I was after. Well, almost. There’s always room for improvement and the door is now stowed away ready for next year’s swallow broods.

Quick as a flash

One of the technical aspects I hadn’t banked on having to solve was flash duration. As I’ve mentioned, I wanted the flashes to do all the work, so I had to rely on the flash duration to expose the image. This means deliberately using settings on the camera that underexpose the scene so that the flash is the sole source of illumination. The problem here is that there are flashes and flashes! I tried my studio flash heads, but the flash duration was too long. Even on lowest power, the heads’ flash was on for too long so that the effective shutter speed didn’t freeze the motion of the birds. I’ve since found out that there is a way to do this by using the PocketWizard Flex TT5 and TT1 wireless control units to shorten the duration on these heads, so I’ll have to try that some time. However, I did use these wireless units to trigger three speedlights on various lighting stands. Honestly, the place looked like a shiny forest at times!

Speedlights have the advantage that, particularly on low power, their flash duration is extremely short. We’re talking 1/38,500 sec on minimum power for a Nikon SB900. That’s fast enough to freeze almost anything! In the end, I used more power and a longer flash duration than this, but the effects were what I’d been looking for.

Ethics

I should mention at this point that stress to the nesting birds was kept to a minimum. At all stages, I was aware of any heightened agitation and backed off if that was the case.

Swallows are actually pretty forgiving little things and adapt to their environment readily and quickly. For example, when I built the door, it only took them a few minutes to work out how to fly through the hole and they certainly weren’t bothered as long as they could get a clear path to their young. They would land on the lip of the hole or fly in front of it to check that there were no surprises behind and then through they would shoot. I left the door in place, rather than removing it at night and they regarded it as simply part of their home.

I suppose this is no different to a small window opening or a hole in the eaves.

Lastly, the amount of light wasn’t altered much as there were windows upstairs in the barn, too.

Both sets of four chicks fledged successfully and are still buzzing around the skies as I type.

Swallow challenge 2:
Loire Valley

One thing that didn’t occur to me when heading to France on holiday this year was that more than a hundred swallows would routinely use our swimming pool to drink from. They’d line up on the telephone wires in chatty ranks and one by one come swooping down in a precise dive to snatch water from the surface.

Almost fearless, one came within a metre of me while swimming. It must be thirsty work eating flies all day. Yum.

Focus guesswork

As you might imagine, I felt compelled to get a photograph of this, although I again came up against the technical difficulties of predicting where a fast flying swallow is likely to be and taking a photo at the exact moment it opens its mouth for a gulp of water.

Lift off

The wind direction altered which side of the pool the birds would fly from as they seemed to prefer diving into the wind, presumably so they could get immediate lift once they’d taken a drink. I imagined what might happen to an unlucky bird that got the timing wrong: I don’t think it would be able to take off from the water, so would probably not survive.

Manual everything

Again, using manual exposure and focus I cranked the ISO up to achieve very fast shutter speeds and clicked away with a fast frame rate.

Trial and error eventually got some results that I’m fairly happy with.

Until next year

Back in England, I’ll be very sad to see these little fellows fly off to Africa soon. The skies will seem a lot less cheery without their playful frolicking and scratchy twittery songs. I’ll just have to come back and look at the pictures I’ve taken every once in a while over winter and wait for their return early next summer.

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K