My daughter Joyah. Ataahua is the Maori word for beautiful and that i think she is :) This is my first challenge with my new Dslr. I am dissapointed with the fact its a little soft would like to know how to get it sharper.
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About all I can offer here is to study your camera's manual. If you want to shoot in JPG for now instead of RAW, that's fine. Just figure out how to set the sharpness to how you like it. Usually, SLRs are set by default to produce pretty soft JPGs, on the assumption that people who own SLRs will want to do their own processing.
I think you have more than softness, though. The shutter speed of 1/30s is quite slow. I like to shoot portraits at least at 1/60s, and preferably faster. The wide aperture of F/3.6 also gives you relatively little depth of field to work with. Both of those could be solved by pushing your ISO higher than 100. For every doubling of ISO, you can double the shutter speed or close down the aperture a stop. For example, at ISO 200 you could've shot at 1/60s. At ISO 400 you could've shot at 1/60s and a stop smaller aperture (about F/5).
Aide from that, I suggest either having her face the light or hold up a piece of posterboard in front of her to put some light back into her eyes.
I felt the same way when I first started using my new DSLR. I find that if I manual focus I can get it a little crisper. Also, in photoshop or some editing tool you can unsharp mask and that seems to work pretty good. Sorry for the late response. I just stumbled on your photo and noticed you had the same camera.
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