I rarely post any of my images here but I thought I should today. Here is one of my portraits I took today at Snow Monkey Park (Jigokudani Yaen Koen), Japan. I am not biasing your edits by posting my edit, which is still to be done anyway.
Japan-0115.CR3 (32.4 MB)
This file is licensed Creative Commons, By-Attribution, Share-Alike.
Unfortunately, the macaque isn’t that sharp, I would have wished. I tried my best to sharpen it , without letting it look strange. I’m afraid my success is limited.
Japan-0115.CR3.xmp (11.0 KB)
The joys of wildlife photography and just looking on a small laptop screen. I have many more that hopefully are sharper but I can live with the little bit of softness. With human portraits we tend to like soft and this bloke is more human than some humans I know.
Imo it’s sharp enough, with a few instance of D&S like I used, it would make a fine print even in A3 size. And if it weren’t enough there’s a ton of other software like DXO and so on that would help make it even better were it needed.
Personally I am disappointed the camera let me down with the focus or maybe it was subject blur from too low an ISO or too shallow DoF because I deliberately opened the lens wide open to blur the background. After 54 years as a photographer I still stuff up images when there is no time to plan the shot. He was rotating his head at the time and I picked this one because of the angle. I was shooting my Canon R7 at H+ speed so less than a second for three bracketed shots but he had fully swivelled his head. I can live with the softness of this image and actually prefer it over the sharpening attempts trying to fix a soft image.
If you stay at your original crop, I think it is sharp enough to enjoy your shot. But If you make a close portrait. It is in my opinion too soft.
I like some softness, especially when it comes to skin. But hair and eyes have to be sharp.
Unfortunately, I have as well from time to time the problem that the autofocus is slightly off. For me, a reason to already look for a new camera with a more reliable autofocus. On my site it not only happens on moving objects but as well on stills. If it was only on moving objects, I could live with it. But making some landscape shots and recognizing afterwards they are not as sharp as they should be is really annoying.
Which camera is causing you the autofocus issue? I try to use manual focus more often now but with wildlife that is not always practical.
A Canon EOS 90D. Most times it happens when I take photos against the light. To focus manually is hard through the viewfinder without some help from ancient times and I don’t like the monitor.
