outdoor photography

Needham's Skimmer One of the most disappointing feelings in photography is when you come home, load your pictures onto your computer, and realize that the photographs you thought were going to be so good are actually blurry. There are four basic causes for blurry photos, and there are ways you can correct for these causes in the future. Camera Movement --No one can hold a camera perfectly still, so camera movement can cause motion blur in an image.  To solve this, you can use a tripod , a lens with image stabilization (IS), or adjust your aperture/ISO  to get a fast shutter speed.  The faster the shutter speed, sharper you image will be.  The best solution for most photographic situations is a tripod.  I admit, though, that sometimes tripods aren't practical, so lenses with good IS can be a big advantage. Beware, though, raising your ISO may give you noisier images. And even with IS lenses, you can have blurry photographs if your shutter speed i...

Using a tripod is a discipline often shunned even by very experienced photographers.  "It slows me down, I have to lug it with me, and I have an image stabilized lens, so why do I even need it?" Okay, I'm going to admit it.  For some types of photography, I've said the same thing.  My recent passion is bird photography, and I'm hand holding a 400mm lens most of the time, especially after the sun is up.  Using a tripod is a great way to miss photographs of birds.  They just don't stick around long enough for me to get my tripod set. And for birds in flight, a tripod is often useless unless I already have it set when I see the bird flying.  So there are legitimate reasons not to use a tripod.  There, I said it. But for much of outdoor photography, it's better to use a tripod, even if you're using great, image stabilized (IS) lenses.  There are a number of very important advantages: It slows you down.  Yes, that's an advantage.  By s...