Scarbourough South bay
 

This was taken on thye night of the qQueens Diamond jubilee concert.

[IMG]http://media.digitalcameraworld.com/forum/gallery/files/1/5/3/4/2/3/scarbourough_south_bay_by_night.jpg[/IMG]

It looks like a beautiful location and I love the colours but there is a noticeable lack of detail throughout the scene , I don't know if it's down to bad focus or camera shake combined with a long exposure .

Could you tell us what set up you used .

Mark

Hi,
I'm not my home PC so I can't get to the data, but it was aprox F/10-11 I think, and was a lenthy exposure of somewhere between 15 and 30 seconds. Can't remember now if I used an ND filter or not. Probably not with it being at night, so there was no need. I manually focussed the best I could, but it was dificuilt with it being so dark. I think I manually focussed on the lighthouse.

Hi, as Mark pointed out, it looks a little on the soft/blurry side. for a wide landscape like that you may find you get better sharpness by using something more like f16-f18.

The temptation in that scene would be to focus on the lighthouse, but you can get a lot more of the scene sharp by using hyper focal distance when shooting a wide landscape like that. As a simple way of thinking of it, a lens focuses on one point and in front and behind that point it slowly starts to get blurry. By focussing on the lighthouse, all the area behind it is wasted sharpness. Id choose a point about 1/3rd of the way up from the bottom of the image and focus there. That way you'll get maximum sharpness throughout. the horizon line would still be sharp, but you'd have much more detail in the foreground.

Also for an exposure of that length, a tripod is a must, or at the very least the camera should be on a solid surface.

I'd also think about investing in a remote shutter release, which can be picked up for a few pounds on ebay and go a long way towards eliminating camera shake.

The colours and composition are nice, the sharpness would really transform the shot though, especially with the lovely reflections

It was on a tripod, and I used the timer to ensure the camera was steady.

I focussed on thelighthouse because it was the easiest thing to see and focus on. Hyperfocal distances confuse me. I don't understand them. lol. Think I need to do some research.

Just checked the data, it's F/10, 38mm, ISO 100 and a 30second exposure. It was a little breezy so I wonder if the breeze has cause somecamera shake.

As has been pointed out something like f16 might have been better with the focus round about that sandbar in the foreground. If you have a hook on the bottom of your tripod centre column you could hang your camera bag from it if there is a breeze.

Hi, on a 30 sec exposure the wind can definitely have an effect, hanging your camera bag off the tripod or even against a leg to weigh it down can help. Using a tripod and self timer you should definitely be able to get more overall sharpness.

Hyperfocal is confusing until you get your head round it. Try and google it until you find an explanation that makes sense to you, sometimes it all seems like gobbledegook, but Ive seen a couple of articles which strip it rich down to basics. For a landscape shot, the easiest way is to use something like f16-f18, so you get a decent range of depth of field, and then focus about a third of the way up (on your images that would be the reflections on the beach). It seems odd as you'd think you'd want the lights of the buildings sharp, but using that method you'll get pretty much the whole scene sharp.

It might help to think of the basic idea below, which Ive simplified a lot but is more or less right:

Focus on the horizon = the nearest point will be very out of focus
Focus on the foreground = the horizon will be quite out of focus
Focus on a third of the way up the image = foreground in focus and horizon in focus

The aperture you choose makes the above rule more or less apparent - so f1.4 would make it very apparent, and f18 would make it less pronounced

Hope that doenst sound too confusing. If you're going to shoot landscapes its something thats really handy to understand, and will help you get much sharper images

Ah right, cheers. I had heard somewhere that most lens work better and are sharper at around F/8-F/11....Can't remember where I read that now.

Yep a lot of lenses lose quality as the higher end, but you get so much more depth of field at the higher end its a bit of a balancing act. As a rule Id use f8-f11 for something like architecture where the furthest point isn't too far away, but a landscape vista you're probably better off going for f16 or so. A good guide is look at the tech info of really good shots, and see what f stop the pro's tend to use for different scenarios

cool, cheers. some great advice, much appreciated. I'll have to go do some reserch.