NIKON Nikkor 18-200mm AF-S VR

[Len J]

Here is one I took at night I know there has to be somthing I can do diff. These are all shot off hand no support.

This unretuched and shot as a jpg. The EXIF data is on picture when you up load or no?

That helps a lot.

There are a few problems with what you are doing that are creating less than optimally sharp pictures.

1.) You are shooting at f/4 This hurts your sharpness in 2 ways. First off.......you are shooting the lense almost completly wide open (at 55MM Wide open is 3.5). Most lens's, this one included are sharpest slightly stopped down. In this case, your going to get sharper pictures at about f/8.....Secondly.....f/4 is a pretty narrow Depth of Field for the scene you are trying to photograph. That means that a very narrow area, equally distant from the camera will be in focus, with everything else in-front of & behind out of focus. What was your focus point?

2.) You are shooting at 1/60's for a 55 MM focal length. That is not fast enough to freeze anything that is moving, so your picture appears soft.....because your subject moved while the shutter was open. In addition, even the smallest camera shake will add to this problem.

You are in a tough situation shooting this subject in this light. You need a faster shutter speed which will require a higher ISO which is going to bring noise into the picture but you also need to stop down the lense to get an adequate DOF.........

An 18-200 is not going to to help you here The only 3 solutions I can think of are:

1.) A faster lense
2.) A better snesor. I have a D300 that I'm comfortable shooting up to about iso 2000...that's a stop & 1/2 better than you shot that picture with. A D700 ($$$$'s) can easily shoot 2 to 2 1/2 stops better than that iso 800 you shot in with low noise levels
3.) A flash.

Hope that helps.

len