Noisy or Shaky

Recently, I have been told that the iso I used for some of my shots were too high. Well, unless you are a brain surgoen or a guy who sleeps with tripod/monopod, camera shakes as a result of less than ideal shooting situation is always a big hurdle, even with IS/VR activated. Without any sort of image stabilization, I would always try to shoot at shutter speed of at least 1/60, preferably 1/100 or higher to double sure that my day would not be ruined by my shaky hands. I would trade a shaky shot for a noisy one any day and the world is never perfect anyway! But that is just my opinion :)





Lately I have worked a lot with the 50mm f/1.4 and what I have found is with the aperture wide open (1.4-1.8), images produced are very soft with a fair amount of bokeh chromatic abberation. Stopping down to f/2.8 or narrower produces much better results but increases the depth of field for portaiture work. Shooting landscape with the 50mm prime presents a bigger challenge as I found out during our trip to Sydney and Melbourne. During the whole trip, I sticked to my beloved 50mm prime while Jin has the zoom lens. Using f/13 and above produces softer images somehow when viewed at 100%. But of course, these situations vary with different lenses, some expensive zoom lens I believe are pretty sharp wide open but then I will have to save more money to find that out :P