First outing with the 55-300mm :)

All the pictures here do actually have EXIF data. (I use the FxIF extension in Firefox to show it if available.)

I've had a look through them myself. A mixed bunch, if I may say so!

They all look to have been taken at full aperture which doesn't offer the sharpest resolution, and limits the depth of field so the images must be focussed spot on at those focal lengths.

I think your sharpness concern could be partly down to camera shake. I presume you have the shake option turned on if you were hand holding? Telephoto shots are prone to suffer from this. Ways to overcome it are either to use a tripod and/or up the ISO. You were only using ISO 200 so could have gained a stop or two going up to 400 or even 800. Using f8 would have been better than using f5.6 and halving the shutter speed would have overcome some of the camera shake. If you needed more depth of field then stop down even further - you have to decide as the camera hasn't really got a clue what you are doing, despite all the electronics in it.

I think the dog and white swam head pictures have suffered from camera shake. More practice at holding the camera steady at 1/400 sec required! However the black swan looks sharp (at least the bill does), just lacks a bit of depth of field and critical focussing on the eyes.

The football photos are interesting. Good action shots and look sharper than the animal photos. Not sure what the footballer in the first one in the yellow top would think about his head being chopped off though! The second football one looks quite good to me. Reasonably sharp and good composition. I'm not sure what to make of the third one with the hoody looking on at the lone player. Shame you cut their feet off, otherwise it would be really good.

For the runner photo you managed a slighly faster exposure of 1/640 sec and it looks a lot sharper - I suspect less camera shake!

Maybe it was your intention, but the lion statue just looks to be a silhouette unless its my monitor set a bit dark. If you have a RAW file for that you may find you can bring out some more detail in it, if you so wish.

The last duckling picture looks to have the mother duck in focus, but not the duckling which I presume is the subject of the photo. This is probably due to allowing the camera to select the focus point rather than doing it yourself. The bill on the duck does look to be sharp though, but probably not what you intended.

It can be quite tricky to get sharp pictures with normal lenses but it often doesn't show up so much. Put on a long telephoto and it is much harder to get sharp photos. If you have the auto pattern focussing turned on consider trying the centre spot setting instead. You can control the point of focus better. So focus first, and then recompose and take the picture. The camera is likely to choose something other than what you want for its focus point, like when it missed the duckling completely!

Hope that helps a little.

John

The filter I was using was just a UV filter. Dr O will back me up because he was trying to help me when I came up with the brainwave regarding the filter. One day I couldn't get a really sharp image and the next day, having taken the filter off, I could, taking exactly the same shot in the same light.

Anyway, if Adam is using a filter, I'd suggest taking it off to see if it makes a difference, as well as the other suggestions already made. It took me a little while to get used to this lens as it's much longer than anything else I'd ever used. Got there in the end, though.