I love my old sony a5000. But as I get my toes wetter with techniques and tutorials and editing, I often think it is not so great anyome.

Please see this: https://imgur.com/a/XPLLBmx This is the RAW file open in RawTherapee, with no processing applied beyond the camera specific distortion corrections.

It was a sunny day. I have my ISO set to auto. The picture is not blurry because of long exposure or anything, but it’s simply not clear and sharp. Granted, that’s a lot of zooming on the software editor, but shouldn’t it be sharper?

What am I doing wrong? Any advice would be appreciated!

  • ApatheticAbsurdist@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    1. the lens isn’t great

    2. you’re shooting at 400 ISO and the a5000 is going to show noise earlier than newer cameras and you’ve got a bit of noise.

    3. You have a bit of color noise that’s making it look worse. RawTherapee is a decent tool for free, but paid programs like Capture One Pro or Lightroom will have better noise reduction (you can try increasing color noise reduction and see if that helps, just avoid luminance noise reduction as that will make the image softer)

    4. You are shooting at 1/60th of a second… that is a shutter speed that can cause some shake/blur which might not be so dramatic as a 1 second exposure, but it’s enough that can cause the image to be a bit soft.

    5. You shot this image VERY wide and are cropping in substantially on a 20MP image. If you had a 100-ish mm lens you’d have far more detail at that distance and would need to crop in less.

    • SkoomaDentist@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      You shot this image VERY wide and are cropping in substantially on a 20MP image.

      And they are pixel peeping at around 5x pixel magnification which will make even a small amount of noise look much worse than it would at 1:1 crop.

  • jackystack@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Yes, no, maybe?

    Consider using a better lens. Move closer to your subject. Use focus magnification and a tripod. Collectively, this will improve your IQ.

  • TiMouton@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Definitely a combination of lens, slow shutter speed and trying to crop a lot on a crop sensor. Definitely doesn’t have anything to do with the age of the camera. I’m still shooting on a 5DMk2 which is like 6 years older than the a5000 and those old cameras put out very sharp images. Iso 400 shouldn’t contribute much to the noise. I often have to use iso1600 and it’s not too bad.

  • T3ddyBeast@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    lol this crop is wild. There is no camera/lens combo that looks good this cropped in. I would call this the wrong lens for the job rather than poor camera performance. Even for pixel peeping don’t go past 100% zoom because no one will ever look that close

  • QuantumTarsus@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    Yea, this is a you problem, not a camera problem or even a lens problem.

    The title of this post should really be, “Am I asking too much of my old a5000 ?”

  • X4dow@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    you are cropping an image into 800%, what do you expect? to see individual hairs?