Quote Originally Posted by EOSThree
Beautiful colors. Be careful of your background, the second shot while sharper loses something because his beak is blending into the background.

The first shot is losing sharpness due to camera shake or subject movement or both. 1/15 is just too slow of a shutter speed to handhold well. The old rule of thumb for SS is 1/focal length of the lens you are using.

With the modern cameras with crop factored in you have to take the crop into account also, for your oly this is 2x so your 14-42 is effectively 28-84. The slowest SS I would use is 1/30 for the short end and 1/100 or so for the long end. Your mileage may vary.

A DSLR doesn't apply a lot of processing to a shot, it leaves the majority of the processing up to you. This is a good thing, because you can process to get the image you are looking for, rather than what the camera thinks you are looking for.

Finally, although an improvement from the first shot to the second shot, neither are overly sharp, and this could be due to some or all of the factors I mentioned.

If you are just getting used to the aspects of photography, a good book that will teach you all of the basics of photography is Understanding Exposure by Bryan F. Peterson. It's photo 101.
Thank you for the comments, every time I read I learn something new. .

So with the crop factor, I guess you are saying that when I shoot with SS 15 or so then its really about 30? Not sure if I am understanding. But if thats true, then shooting at about SS 25-30 should give me some more sharpness?

What I have noticed, the faster the SS the darker the shot is coming out, and If I bump the ISO from 400 - 800 then I start getting a lot of grain. So I think I should be doing something with aperture? correct?

But thank you about the beak tip, I agree that it needs to be corrected. And I will see if my local used book store has a copy of that book, sounds like I could really benefit from giving it a read.

Happy Holidays,
OWOL