Hello all! I recently bought a second hand EOS M50 to take a first step on from iPhone photography. I’m using a second hand EF-M 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM lens. I think I have a basic grasp of the exposure triangle and have been learning to shoot in manual. I’m mostly interested in photographing my travels - street and landscape - so I’m always handheld and I’m shooting straight to JPEG (Fine+Large) on the camera. I like the idea of capturing a scene in the moment and not messing with it in post production. My primary issue is that my images aren’t very sharp. In fact comparing them to iPhone images, the phone is performing a lot better! I strongly suspect that’s because the iPhone is a much better photographer than me, but I’ve hit a brick wall making improvements to my photos with blogs and YouTube etc, so I’m here for some advice! I’ve uploaded a couple of images to show what I mean. The first was shot with ISO 100, f8, 1/250s. As far as I know those settings should be fine for a daytime landscape - low ISO in daylight, reasonably deep depth of field to keep the foreground and background in focus, shutter speed high enough to handle the focal length and being handheld. The second is ISO 250, f8, 1/250s - same as above but higher ISO due to cloud cover. Neither image is very sharp - even without zooming in, there’s not the crispness I was hoping for. So, are my expectations too high for sharpness - is this as good as it gets for my setup? Any settings or kit that would help? Am I going to have to start shooting in RAW and post-processing? Am I just a beginner and the quality will improve as I do? Many thanks for reading Mike
You have environmental effects and what is conservative camera settings working against what your expecting. https://gdlp01.c-wss.com/gds/3/0300029803/01/eosm50-um-en.pdf Picture style lets you define the level of sharpening in camera. I am not a fan of that style of manual and it leaves a lot to the user to see what options are on screen but page 127 and 128 talk about adjusting picture styles, this will define the processing of the photo by the camera in JPG. I promise you regardless of the phone you have the images are very heavily processed, your phone provider assumes they will make assumptions and give you a nice photo where you don't need to do much, Canon /Nikon /Pentax they will assume you want to dial in processing to your flavor so they follow an almost opposite approach. They do give some pre-defined options to use especially for the beginners and JPG shooters so they have a place to start. Focus wise you also need to pay attention to where the focus system is grabbing focus, f8 should allow for some decent depth of field yes. You can pick where the focus is by adjusting the location of the focus box or by manually focusing if you need that control. The first shot is hard in the distance where the atmosphere is causing a haze which may be masking over where the camera tried to focus. That will soften the far end of a long deep shot like that, you will see this on party cloudy and sunny days, look up a UV or skylight filter as those are what is needed to combat such an effect.
Hi and welcome to the forum, i'm also an M50 user, been using it as my first camera for 2 1/2 years, i've only ever used jpeg, i find the canon jpeg files excellent, if i want to edit them i use photoshop 5 and yes Raw has alot more data but there is plenty of scope for adjustment in the largest quality jpeg i am mostly a wildlife shooter so thats another reason why i prefer jpeg on the M50, its got a small buffer so using jpeg keeps that flowing well. as for the landscape stuff, guess what is my least used type of photography, yep, landscape, probably because i'm in london uk and landscape isn't really something city folk have much of. the out come of this is i've not really had much experience in long range wide imaging but i do have a heap of experience in the long range telephoto stuff, as a jpeg shooter you might want to try using the picture style "fine detail", i find that very good for sharper images without being too sharp it looks jaggard i found auto and standard to be too soft, 90% of what i post is straight out of camera jpeg in fine detail and the only alterations are resizing for media and maybe a white balance or contrast adjustment, nothing major. though i have seen some amazing images from the kit lenses (18-55mm and more often the 15-45mm) i never really liked it, but to be fair to the lens (15-45mm) i was all about the wildlife when i started out so i went quickly to the 100-400mm and eventually gave the kit lens t my gf when i bought her an M50 too for her vlogs A lens i highly recommend is the efm 18-150mm, this lens offers excellent wide and close up with decent reach too its the lens i use alot of the time for general and travel stuff, in effect it is the replacement for my kit lens and makes a great companion to my longer zoom lenses. as the kit lens you have is the older one there may well be an image quality improvement here but for wide landscapes i really cant be sure as its that area of photography i havent tried much, certainly one i want to take the time to do some IQ tests on as i have plenty of lenses that would qualify, one such lens that comes to mind is the 11-22mm canon efm, its very sharp at close to medium range with a fairly flat coverage. aside from lenses your settings do indeed seem to be ok, a tripod or place to rest the camera my help out keeping to iso 100and running a lower shutter speed to dial in the exposure, its what i use for the moon. the M50 sensor is most certainly capable of great image quality and sharpness. the highest quality efm lens is the canon 32mm ƒ1.4, it was designed to resolve on the higher 32mp sensor of the M6mkII, i have the lens and its image quality rivals the best sigma art primes i have but alas i can't say how good it is at long range wides yep, something i need to go and test so i'm in a better position to help out when landscape stuff comes up in the mean time try a critical sharpness test on the kit lens you have with a box with text on it at some distance away with the camera on a tripod or hard surface, use the 2 or 10 second timer to rule out any camera shake, defiantly try fine detail picture style i think you will like that. also as a jpegger i set the record button to white balance in stills mode so its quicker to get to when you shooting, as a jpegger this is an important setting esp if you dont want to or dont have and post editing i have been using photoshop 5 on my old macbook and you can change the white balance alot easier than people make out it to be in jpeg when you use the grey point tool, though RAW is easier, more automated, but raw is something i never use, saves a ton of space too!! i look at it this way, jpeggers have way more skill, we edit the image before its been taken......................i jest of course..........or do i please, feel free to ask as may questions as you like, always happy to (try) and help
Hi Mike! Are you using auto focus or manual focus? Try autofocus and really select an area of your frame you want as your main subject, you can tap on the screen on an m50 to use one of the many focus points, and also try pressing the shutter half way down to refocus if you need to, this is with auto focus on
the focus aid i use for critical sharpness is the x5 or x10 magnification, this is available in one shot only not servo as the constant focusing feature of servo kicks the mag back to normal with the magnification feature, it only uses the magnification as a focus aid on the focus point it has no effect on the image taken there are a couple of points with magnify, if you use it through the dedicated mag button on the camera from factory it will always start from zero/normal then you need to turn the wheel to select 5x or 10x, thats too slow for me so i never use that i use a custom set button, on mine i set the dustbin button to mag, with it done through this way the mag goes straight to the last mag you used, so if you used it at x5 it will go to that one first then you can either use it or scroll it to 10x if you are in one shot and using the canon efm lenses (and some other makes that include it), you can half press the shutter button to focus then turn the focus ring at the same time and the camera will go into manual focus and magnify at th same time, this is a really useful trick when focusing on cluttered trees in wildlife these are all from the perspective of an 99% evf shooter, most of the time when i use the screen i have my laptop with me as well so i use that in live mode, thats mostly for planets and astro stuff or critical lens testing
