Canon 18-55mm Lens

[voisel]

Hi All

I'm new to this forum and photography in general so forgive my slight ignorance on certain areas. I'm really interested in landscape photography but at the moment only have my 18-55mm stock canon lens at my disposal. When shooting landscape pictures I keep getting a re-occuring problem with image sharpness and overall quality especially the grass, when I shoot anything with grass in it it really brings the overall quality of the image down (this is better seen in the link provided below) the grass quality is terrible as are some of the other objects in the scene. I really hope someone can help me out as this issue is really bugging me and I'd really like to overcome this issue so I can get some great looking landscape shots.

Here are the settings for the picture taken below:

Canon 550D with 18-55mm Lens
F-stop: f/9
Exposure Time: 1/320
Focal Length: 18mm
Shooting Mode: Manual
No filters used
Custom White Balance



Here's the link to the picture:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/66138650@N05/8947188682/


Thanks
Lee

[gordon g]

Looking at the image you linked to there isnt an obvious technical problem at the resolution it is displayed at. The exposure looks balanced, the depth of field gives good front to back sharpness. I wonder whether the issue is one of sharpening/lack of, or artifacts being created in resizing the image. Are you shooting RAW and converting or is the image an out-of-the-camera JPEG? Either may cause a problem - over-compression and too aggressive sharpening will create edge artifacts that can look very ugly, but under-sharpening when converting from RAW (all RAW files need some sharpening) will leave edges undefined and grassy areas will lose texture.