beginner trying to get better

I always seem to have an issue with camera shake. Even when I seem to hold the camera still, my pictures look blurry. Is it a setting issue or just my skill level as a photographer. This was taken with my D5500 and the 18-140 kit lens. Any help in obtaining better sharpness would be greatly appreciated.

Try using a depth of field calculator Online Depth of Field Calculator. It can be surprising to see just how small the depth of field can be at longer focal lengths. Practice on objects at different apertures and focal lengths can be really helpful.
Hope this helps.

It appears that your aperture is set to a very good one for optimizing depth-of-field. However, for the 122 mm focal length, your shutter speed of 1/100 second is slow.

A rule of thumb for hand-held shooting is to use a shutter speed of at least as fast as the reciprocal of your focal length. For this example, using a shutter speed of 1/100 would cause you to zoom your focal length back to 100mm or less, or to change your shutter speed to 1/122 second or faster, so it could be set to 1/125 second or faster.

WM

Whiskeyman is right on. Even though your lense has VR technology to help negate the effects of camera shake, as a new shooter I would still suggest sticking to the reciprocal or possibly even a little faster to make sure you nail it.

As you get comfortable with your technique, you can lower that minimum shutter speed and still maintain good sharpness.


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I will try that and see how it goes.

Also be sure of exactly what your camera is focusing on. If you are leaving it up to one of the automatic modes, no guarantee the focus was on the squirrel. I can't really tell from the shot where the camera focused, so I suspect it is camera shake from a slightly slow shutter speed like others said. But be aware of your focus point as well. Try single point focus and be sure it falls on the subject. You can practice on a can of soda or some other product box with small printing. It makes it easier to judge how well you focused and how slow you can hand hold when you review pictures and zoom in to read the label.

That helped quite a bit. This was from a much closer distance though. This is cropped as well.

A very good effort! In your last picture you've probably done all you could with your lens. I like the composition.

Now it is time to play in post-processing. Try lightening the shadows. You will be amazed how much information from our sensors can be extracted from shadows. Here is a quick fix in Photoshop and NIK tools, using Detail Extractor (I only had your very highly compressed JPEG from this forum, you can do much better with the original raw file):

So did you just up the exposure compensation? I only have NX-D and I am a really new person with that.

Also check The proper way to hold a camera.Breathing techniques will come in later
Tremendous progress between the two images already !!

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I use raw therapee which is free open source for my raw processing. On something like this, I'd play a little bit with White Balance and maybe tweak the red or blue. I don't do too much with brightness as I've found it tends to lessen the photo quality. Instead I may try to make some adjustments using a color curve or adjust the shadow and/or contrast. Finally add a little saturation. Take a photo and just play with the different features and learn what works and what doesn't.

Tuck your elbows into your chest to make your arms shaped like a V. That gives your camera more support, like a tripod.

what everyone has said here is correct. Shutter speed should match your focal length, or faster. Just keep taking pictures and exploring different things. 7 hats the stage I'm in now.