Settings for Nikon D3100. All photos looks REALLY grainy and not sharp at all.

[francdore]

Settings for Nikon D3100. All photos looks REALLY grainy.

Hello, I recently bought a Nikon D3100 and took it with me to Ballito this past weekend to actually try it out for the first time. On the camera's screen all the pictures looked fine. But when I viewed it on my computer today ALL of the photos was grainy. I used autofocus some of the time and at night I sometimes used the no-flash mode when I didn't want those WHITE photos. Even the photos with flash was grainy and had no sharpness.

I also played around with manual mode. When I took daylight photos outside in the sun I set the ISO on 200, shutter speed at about 1/200 or 1/250 and the aperture at f5.6.

Those photos also came out very grainy. And it had no sharpness.

The picture quality setting is on Jpeg - fine. You can view one of the pictures here (view it at full size to see how grainy it is)

What can I do to get the photos to appear sharp?

Thanks in advance!

 

[francdore]

Hi. I just checked again and the ISO was on 400 and not on 200. Would that make a big difference?

Thanks

 

[paperbag]

Well that's not that grainy...have you made sure that your noise reduction is turned on? Maybe your focus should be more of a concern as your subject (the flower) is way out of focus...check that the body and lens is set to auto focus.

 

[RanzB]

Well that's not that grainy...have you made sure that your noise reduction is turned on? Maybe your focus should be more of a concern as your subject (the flower) is way out of focus...check that the body and lens is set to auto focus.

+1. Your focus seems to be off. There isn't a lot of noise for that size, isn't the D3100 a crop sensor? Also, maybe start shooting in RAW.

 

[francdore]

+1. Your focus seems to be off. There isn't a lot of noise for that size, isn't the D3100 a crop sensor? Also, maybe start shooting in RAW.

I also tried the auto mode on the camera with auto focus and the photo still looks the same (out of focus) when viewed at full size.

 

[koffiejunkie]

Yeah, the grain you see is just jpeg artifacting. If all the pictures are this out of focus, there's probably something wrong with either camera or lens, I would take it back.

 

[francdore]

I just did some research, some reading and had a look at some other close-up pictures and they all look that grainy.

http://daniellemcgrew.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/drm_1456c.jpg

http://api.ning.com/files/tN2xaxGmp...PC6DIdIKfdYnrTq-cNYl*U3utgKebast/IMG_4749.JPG

http://jmaccphotography.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/flower-46881.jpg

http://austinmello.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/macro-flower.jpg

But I suppose I just need more experience with my camera and also a macro lens when taking close-up photos which will probably come out sharper.

 

[rorz0r]

It's really not *that* bad. Turn the ISO down, make sure all in focus etc and that's about as good as you'll ever get. If it bothers you a lot use RAW and some pp software like noiseninja.

 

[francdore]

I'm wearing glasses. Not all the time but just at night when driving. When someone wears glasses, should they also wear their glasses when taking photos?

From my understanding I think if you normally wear glasses and you take photos without your glasses on, the focus will be out as your camera is acting as a lens to get your eyes in focus where the actual photo is actually out of focus.

I hope this makes sense.

 

[koffiejunkie]

fancore, there are a couple of factors at play here. The fourth one doesn't include any EXIF, so I can't comment on that, but the first three are obviously taken at a very short focus distance, and all with consumer lenses. Near focus is usually not the strenght of these lenses, so they may not be at their sharpest. Very near focus also reduces your depth of field, which means the focus plane becomes very thin, making it very easy to mis-focus. Lastly, the sunflower shot is shot at f/16. On crop sensor bodies, defraction starts to affect sharpness from around f/8 on wards. If you mix all of these together, it becomes very easy to get nice sharp shots.

The other thing I've noticed too is that on the cheaper lenses, IS/VR often doesn't play well with static shots. If you're using a tripod, especially, turn it off.

 

[koffiejunkie]

I'm wearing glasses. Not all the time but just at night when driving. When someone wears glasses, should they also wear their glasses when taking photos?

No, your camera should have a dioptic adjustment near the viewfinder, so that you can set it for your eyes. Or get contact lenses - that's what I did.

 

[undesign]

As other posters have pointed out, it looks like mis-focus because of short focus distance. At 28cm (according to EXIF info) you must be very close to the Minimum Focus Distance of your lens. And at the settings used, the DoF is only 9mm, so plenty room for error with even a tiny movement or recompose throwing your focal plane out of kilter.

Edit/ sorry, meant cm, not mm (the focusing distance)

 

[EchoZA]

Can you post some shot's in RAW?

 

[BigAl-sa]

I'm wearing glasses. Not all the time but just at night when driving. When someone wears glasses, should they also wear their glasses when taking photos?

From my understanding I think if you normally wear glasses and you take photos without your glasses on, the focus will be out as your camera is acting as a lens to get your eyes in focus where the actual photo is actually out of focus.

I hope this makes sense.

Remember, you're mainly using autofocus, so it doesn't really matter what you see. What matters is what the active focus point sees, as the camera/lens combo will focus on that, regardless.

 

[francdore]

As other posters have pointed out, it looks like mis-focus because of short focus distance. At 28cm (according to EXIF info) you must be very close to the Minimum Focus Distance of your lens. And at the settings used, the DoF is only 9mm, so plenty room for error with even a tiny movement or recompose throwing your focal plane out of kilter.

Edit/ sorry, meant cm, not mm (the focusing distance)

Thanks for all the advice. I think SiriS got it right. I used the kit lens that came with the camera and was too close to the flower. And I also could have put the ISO a bit lower like ISO 200 or even ISO 100 with a flash. I'll play around with it this weekend and check if I can get it to look better than that. I need to buy a macro lens.