Sharper images with 70-300 lens??????

[tirediron]

Don't have any 'sites to recommend, but a few suggestions:

1. Practice, practice, practice and then practice some more; the beauty of digital is that the film is cheap!

2. Shoot, review, adjust, shoot, review... you get the picture.

3. While you're practicing, I suggest trying the following:

a. Set your camera to shutter priority and then set your shutter speed to 1/500th of a second (as you become more familiar with the lens, you can dial this down a bit)

b. Set your focusing to that it's only usuing a single point, and ALWAYS pay attention to where the camera is focusing and adjust as required

c. Understand the DoF of this lens; remember, long focal lengths have much shallower depths of field at a given aperture then shorter focal lengths.

Good luck!

[F8&Bthere]

Casil shoots Pentax so I'm betting she has in body shake reduction turned on most of the time when shooting hand held and I'm also betting these were shot hand held. While I also have some Pentax gear and find the SR to be a cool and helpful feature, I think the longer the focal length the less effective it is. And any kind of stabilization, be it in lens or in body, while great in a pinch, can't solve subject motion and is rarely a worthy replacement for a tripod (or at least monopod) especially when shooting long-ish slow-ish consumer zooms. I thought I had pretty steady hands until I started using longer lenses and became a full fledged pixel peeper.