I recently purchased the D5200 with the 18-55mm kit lens (my first DSLR) and I'm quite pleased with it. For the past two months I have been reading articles and watching videos to improve my understanding and skill. I primarily enjoy shooting landscapes. Prior to this camera I was using a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ8. It has a "super-zoom" ability that I just loved. I could zoom in on the moon and get reasonably sharp shots that included craters, even some of the smaller ones. Now I realize that the 5200 kit lens is limited to 55mm and thus I can't get similarly zoomed shots with it, but I noticed something frustrating right out of the box. If I roll it to the max of 55mm and place the focus point on a distant object (300ft or so), the object never comes out sharp. The first day I had it I took a photo of a couple guys and their cart on a golf course a couple hundred feet away and they were quite blurry. I figured it was because I didn't know the camera well/didn't use a tripod. Even on the tripod, distant objects never come out sharp. I've tried auto focus, manual focus, zoomed-in live view, nothing seems to work. I recently learned about image stacking as a way to get varying distances of the same shot all in focus, but that would obviously require one of those shots to have sharp focus on the most distant portion, something I can't seem to get. Am I missing something here? Is the 18-55mm kit lens simply insufficient for sharp distant shots? When I take shots of the night sky and focus to infinity, the stars seem pretty sharp. I see landscape photos online where the foreground, middle, and distant mountain peaks that must be a mile or more away, that have exquisite detail throughout. Maybe I'm expecting too much of this lens? Any help would be greatly appreciated.