Why does my pictures seem out of focus when I take them?

I have just upgraded to a nikon DSLR camera. I used to take point and shoots all the time now my pictures appear blurry. Do I blame my inexperience in using shutter speeds?

Clean camera out properly or seek advice from cannon engineers personally!

Try taking the clear plastic lens protector off, sounds stupid but happens a lot

Unless you are shooting at shutter speeds of 1/250th or faster as you begin to learn how to use your camera, there's going to be some blur caused by camera or subject movement during longer exposure times.

If you are trying to use your dSLR like a P&S, by using its LCD and live view to compose your images, then you will be introducing even more camera movement and more blur.

Stop trying to use your fine dSLR like an high quality P&S camera and learn some of the fundamentals of photography and using a fully adjustable camera

A first step is to read the manual and reset the camera to factory settings. If that doesn't do it, I suggest taking your question to the Camera Category where you can get help on your specific model. There are numerous settings that can combine with user errors that can cause the problem.

There are alot of types of blur.

1- Motion blur
2- Camera shake blur
3- Out of focus
4- shallow depth of field.
5- cheap lenses

Each one of these is caused by a different problem.

1- Motion Blur
Motion blur is caused when the motion in the scene is too fast for the shutter speed selected.

What happens here is that the sensor is exposed for too long a time for the movement. The person moving in the scene is basically a paintbrush and the light reflecting off them is the paint. If your shutter speed is too slow then the paintbrush has time to move over a section of the canvas, spreading paint in areas you didn't want.

For example, shooting a still life (bowl of fruit) with a tripod can be done with as slow a shutter speed as you want. The subject isn't moving.
Taking a picture of someone moving would require a shutter speed of at least 1/60th of a second.
Taking a picture of someone running would require at least 1/120th of a second to freeze the action.

2- Camera shake

When shooting handheld, you need to shoot at a faster enough speed so that your own body movements don't cause a type of motion blur. Here' it isn't the paintbrush and paint moving over the canvas but the canvas rubbing itself randomly over the paintbrush.

A good rule of thumb when shooting with long focal lenghts is to shoot as fast your your focal lenght.

So if you are shooting at 50mm then shoot AT LEAST at 1/50th of a second. This will help minimize camera shake.

3- Out of focus
This one is pretty obvious. If you didn't focus correctly on your subject then your image will be blurry.

4- shallow depth of field.

When shooting with a very wide aperture (like f4 or under) the area of focus shrinks.

Think of it like an invisible wall in front of you. Everything in side that wall is in focus and everything before and after that wall is out of focus. The thickness of the wall is controlled by the aperture (the f#) and the distance to the subject.

If your wall is too thin to cover your subject, your subject will be out of focus (or actually only a small part of the subject will actually be in focus).

5- cheap lenses
Cheap lenses aren;t very clear optically speaking and might appear a bit fuzzy, especially when the aperture is wide open and at the maximum focal lengths.

Can you post your pictures? You either have a speed blur from shooting to slowly or you are not focusing properly. If you post a picture it is pretty easy to tell you the problem.

Yep, it's your fault.

There could be many reasons. Study photography and learn about setting up your camera to take the types of shots you want to. There's no simple answer. It is a learning process.

if your shooting moving objects use af-c. On second thought just use af-c all the time