Hello,
i am new here and first of all a big hello to everyone.
Usually i shoot all my photos on full automatic mode. However, the problem i mainly have is that only a little part of the image is sharp and the rest is blurry. This Saturday i am supposed to take photos during a christening in a church. My problem now is that i know the D750 will do most of the job good but i would like to set it manually up that everything infront of the lens is sharp, not just the area it zooms on to. I did do some readings and i figured out that it has to do with the "f" settings. That it needs to be pretty high which makes the photos a bit darker. I have no clue where to start and hope someone can help me to set up my camera for this day.
The gear i am using is a Nikon D750 with a Tamron SP 24-70mm f/2.8 DI VC USD and a YONGNUO SPEED LIGHT FLASH YN-568 EX TTL FP HSS. I also have a Nikon 105mm micro lens and a Nikond 50mm 1.8D available.
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Taking good pictures in difficult lighting with a sophisticated DSLR is not something that any of us can tell you how to do, in the form of a simple recommendation. It's a skill that you have to learn. We cannot even tell you a fixed set of settings that will work in the situation that you describe, without being there to measure the light and judge the conditions in person.
If you do not yet have the skills to take good pictures in a particular situation, then you really ought not be putting someone else in the position of counting on you to take good pictures in that situation.
There is much you need to learn about the various aspects of photography, exposure, focus, depth-of-field, and all that—more than we can teach you in this one thread.
It sounds like you're up against a depth-of-field issue. You want everything in a shot to be in focus, but you can only get that part in focus that is at the distance to which the lens is actually focusing. A smaller aperture (indicated by a greater ƒ/ number) gets you greater depth of field, meaning a greater margin by which something can be closer or farther than the point at which the lens if focused, and still be sharp; but it comes at the cost of letting less light in. To compensate, you have to either go to a slower shutter speed (meaning you'll get more motion blur if anything is moving in the shot, or even in the whole picture, if you're not holding the camera steady enough); or increase the sensor ISO (which will give you grainier, “noisier” images).
Oddly, even though I've been heavily into photography since my youth, in the 1970s, I only in the last few years ever heard the term
“exposure triangle”; though I've long understood the concepts associated with this term. They are the three parameters that must be balanced, in accordance to how much light there is, to get a properly-exposed picture—Shutter speed, aperture size, and sensor ISO setting (or, back in the stone-aged days, film speed).
The more light there is, the easier it is to get everything in the shot sharp and clear. As you get to lower light levels, you have to make sacrifices. A larger aperture lets in more light, but you lose depth of field. A slower shutter speed lets in more light, but you're more vulnerable to motion blur. Faster film, or a more sensitive sensor setting, requires less light, but you get a grainier or noisier image.
If there is any motion at all in the pictures you intend to take on this occasion, then your apparent desire to have everything in the shot in sharp focus is probably just not realistically achievable. If there's no motion at all, then you can put the camera on a tripod, use the smallest aperture setting available on whatever lens you use, use the lowest ISO setting,and take as long an exposure as it takes, probably on the order of several seconds.
Let me suggest that as a matter of artistic value, it is not always good to have everything sharp. Usually, there's one subject in the picture; you want that subject to be sharp, and you want everything in the background to
not distract from the subject. Often, it is good for the background, foreground, and anything else that is not the subject, to be out of focus. Start thinking in those terms, and I think you'll be much closer, in this case, to being able to get pictures that you'll be pleased with.
This post turned out to be much more than I intended to write,and I've barely scratched the surface.