Blurry travel photos are painful, especially when you’ve traveled far for rare moments. Knowing why your shots aren’t sharp—and how to fix them—can make all the difference.
Coming to you from Belinda Shi, this straightforward video tackles why even premium cameras sometimes yield blurry images. Shi emphasizes that camera weight, not just focal length, significantly affects camera shake and sharpness. She challenges the common “reciprocal rule,” which advises setting shutter speed based on focal length, pointing out it doesn’t consider the gear’s weight. Shi advises similar adjustments for telephoto lenses, ensuring camera weight doesn’t sabotage your shots.
The second issue Shi addresses is shutter speed with moving subjects. Whether you’re capturing vibrant street scenes, energetic sports events, or wildlife in action, using the right shutter speed is non-negotiable. Shi suggests starting with 1/250 second for slower movements and escalating to 1/1,000 second or faster for rapid action like wildlife or sports. Shi points out clearly that with travel photography, second chances rarely happen, making the correct shutter speed setting even more important.
Shi further covers another major source of blur: overly wide apertures. Those fast prime lenses with f/1.4 or f/1.2 apertures deliver beautiful background blur but make sharpness challenging due to a razor-thin depth of field. Shi advises stopping down, especially when your subjects move slightly. She personally limits her aperture to f/2.8 in dynamic environments like family trips or street photography to consistently nail sharpness.
When shooting landscapes with detailed foregrounds and distant elements, Shi says even f/11 might not offer enough depth. Instead, she suggests narrower apertures like f/16 while adjusting your focus point to maximize sharpness across the entire scene. For critical sharpness in expansive vistas, Shi highlights focus stacking, taking multiple images at varying distances and blending them later, a method frequently used by pros to achieve exceptional sharpness, especially as you get close to diffraction issues.
Finally, Shi tackles low-light situations common during travel, such as evening markets or intimate dining experiences. Higher ISO settings can significantly degrade image sharpness, particularly beyond ISO 3200. Equipment matters most here, she explains, though skill in managing settings still makes the biggest difference. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Shi.
