Originally Posted by
pschlute
Hi Caleb, welcome to the forum.
I had a look at and downloaded the original image from Flickr. The scene is a charming one and well composed, but it has issues.
1. You are obviously pointing the camera up to make sure the roof of the church is in the scene but this has the effect of creating converging verticals (perspective distortion). It makes the buildings look like they are leaning back. It is only slight in this image but it is noticeable. A way to avoid it is to keep the camera level, use any level display if available in your viewfinder. If that would cut off the tops of buildings use a wider lens and crop the image.
The good news is that converging verticals can be corrected in software like LR, but you must give the image plenty of space, as the process will involve losing parts of your image.
2. The area around the windows of the house where I guess your AF locked on to is reasonably in focus but the rest of the image is not. As others have pointed out for a scene like this you want to be using f8-f11 to get a sharp image throughout. I don't know what lens you used but if it has a filter on it take it off.
Others have commented on the fact that bright sunny days are difficult for scenes like this as you end up with a dynamic range that the camera cannot deal with perfectly. One solution is to take bracketed shots and merge them in the LR HDR Merge tool.
Look forward to more shots from you. Again, a charming scene.