White roof from an old fashioned buttery, Somerset, Bermuda.

Another example of why you should watch your aperture – taken at f22 – which is daft, because the resulting photo is soft (though this can be sort of fixed in post processing, why not get it right in camera?). It’s not soft through blur or shake though, but through diffraction – just because a lens has an aperture doesn’t mean you should actually use it. In this case diffraction means the lens isn’t actually capable of producing photos that are as sharp as they would be at f16.

If you’re worried about sharpness, use a tripod. Stopping down often causes more problems than it solves.

In all the talk about the engineering of cameras – pixel count, frame rates, memory cards etc. – photographers often forget that at its most fundamental level photography is about physics – it’s about light, and the manipulation of light. Your art is mediated by physics. Forget that, and your pictures will suffer.