| Joined: | Wed Apr 18th, 2012 |
| Location: | United Kingdom |
| Posts: | 4186 |
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The horse is overexposed (whiter than the background) and this leads to loss of detail in the body. I've selectively darkened the horse a tad, on the image below ....but it only adds a smidging extra detail. The problem is that the horse body is primarily low contrast but also overexposed ...so can't be back adjusted.
The other thing I notice is iso noise and some jpegging artefacts.....these can also add to the appearance of soft focus in areas of low contrast. It's less obvious in the contrasty sand for example.
Clearly using 6400 iso is too far on the D90. I seem to recall never going beyond 1600 back in the day when my wife used the D90. I understand it was necessary for the shutter speed you chose but you should have still frozen the action at 2000th.
I assume you are using camera settings to maximum quality and minimise compression of your JPEGs. So that really only leaves a couple more suggestions.... try setting exp comp to -1/3 or even -2/3 for the light horse and drop ISO to 3200 better still 1600.
Can't explain why the lens back focuses at wider apertures....maybe being narrower dof field it's just more obvious?
Normally mis focusing is more likely to be a function of the focal length on zoom lenses. That's why it's harder to optimise the AF on a zoom .....often one end is sharper than the other due to the factory's compromise setting.
I've shied away from saying change the camera. But it's true that advances in processors and sensors will improve performance under these sort of exacting conditions.
Last edited on Wed Apr 3rd, 2019 03:50 by Eric
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Eric