How sharp?

How sharp?

Do you worry about sharpness? I know I do, and always have done. As soon as I had more than one lens, I started comparing results, to see which was sharper.

I also worried about focus and my inability to get it precisely where I wanted it. This is possibly a more worthwhile thing to worry about, because there are numerous things that you can do to improve your technique, and thus make your focussing more accurate.

In particular, I’ve agonised over sharpness in lenses, and I’ve often quoted the late Barry Thornton, who wrote ‘Edge of Darkness’ entirely about achieving the maximum sharpness in pictures – ‘No zoom lens is sharp enough for fine art photography’. This isn’t strictly true.



But… If you are making a picture in which ultimate quality contributes to the artistic effect, you will probably want to use a modern fixed focal length lens, not a consumer kit zoom. If resolving every twig against the sky is essential, you’ll be looking at the Sigma Art range and the relatively-few optics of comparable quality. Or, in the end, you may find that large format film is actually the only way to achieve what you want – contact prints from sheet film negatives exhibit stunning sharpness.



The big questions, though, are whether your image depends on sharpness to look good; and how much the sharpness shows in your given medium for presentation. Many images actually depend more on unsharpness for effect – either how the sharpness fades away from a point of interest, or the quality of the unsharp areas, the Bokeh.

And if something hasn’t quite worked, please consider a bit of processing. Now I’m not suggesting that you wang up the sharpness and clarity, because that often produces a bizarre and rather unpleasant ‘look at me, I’m showing off’ sort of a look. It may be worth going for a bit of a retro box camera look with something like the Nik Efex filter collection.

The olive tree shot has been frustrating me for five years – the image I wanted needed more than 16mp to resolve individual leaves (on reflection, opening up a couple of stops might have reduced diffraction and helped), but the catamaran ferry has sufficient detail anyway. I cropped to remove the uninteresting sky, used the Polaroid Transfer filter, then adjusted colour and reduced clarity to get a dreamy and blurry olive grove.



Of course, there’s a delight in shooting images with a camera and lens that makes every detail razor-sharp, just as it’s delightful to drive a car which can out-accelerate everything on the road, or to wield a hammer that’s perfectly balanced and knocks nails in straight every time.

But there’s also great happiness to be found in making creative images that are sharp enough with that kit zoom, keeping up with the traffic in a car that demands plenty of strategic gear-changing, or flattening an errant nail in a park bench with a small rock.

Rock on!