What do you mean by "crisper"?
How are you viewing your pictures, on the lcd, computer, prints?
Is this before or after sharpening in an image editing program?
can you post an example?

Thanks so much for your response. I have attached an example. The lighting in this picture was strained but this goes for most of my pictures. In this picture, I opened my aperture (4.5) but decreased shutter speed to 1/250 to eliminate blur.

Have you used a tripod?

The main issue that I see with this image is that it is very much out of focus (since you used a 1/250 sec. exposure time, I don't think the problem is camera shake). Are you using autofocus and if so, is your lens set to autofocus? Have you selected a particular area for autofocus? The D70 lets you choose one of 5 autofocus areas; if the one on the left was chosen, than the clear blue sky won't allow the camera to focus correctly.

Frans Waterlander
pixographer

It looks like the plane of focus intersects the child's eyes (the eyelashes are sharp), and the man is a bit closer to the camera, and the hands in the foreground much closer yet. If a relatively long focal length was used or the picture was taken close to the subject, then at f/4.5 you would have a very shallow depth of field.

There are two things in the obvious late afternoon , low light level you could have done. Kick the ISO speed setting up to 800, which would give you about f/9 and more depth of focus. And Also be careful that both faces are about the same distance from the camera, possibly by changing your angle of view if needed, so the key elements of eyes and eyebrows and the man's glasses are all in the same plane of focus. If these key elements in people's faces are sharp even if other elements in the picture are out of focus it usually does not detract from the positive effect of the picture.

Sorry, David, but I have to disagree. Not a single part of this image is sharp, not even the child's eyes or eyelashes. It is very likely that there is a focusing problem; either the camera and/or lens focusing is not working correctly or there is a pilot error (autofocus not enabled on both the camera and the lens or an incorrect autofocusing area was chosen).

Frans Waterlander
pixographer

I opened the image up in PSE2, I was able to get the child's face sharper, but not the rest of the image; it took about 5 or 6 steps at 20%, .5 and 0 to get it o the point where I am posting the image.
My guess would be that the F4.5 gives too shallow a dof at the subject distance and lens.

Ronk,

If the camera had focused correctly, at least one area of the picture should have been sharp to begin with, but there simply isn't. Sharpening the picture in an image editor doesn't resolve this problem. Depth of field at f4.5 is very limited but will not cause all areas to be out of focus. Regardless of how much depth of field is desirable in this image, the camera/lens did not properly focus. Before one can address the issue of depth of field, one first has to resolve the focussing issue.

I would very much like to hear what Lolly's Shutter has found out after the initial posts.

Frans Waterlander
pixographer

Lolly Shutter,

Have you been able to spend some more time to find out why your images are not crisp (focused)? I would like to understand what happened and see if I can help you get the kind of pictures that this camera should be able to give you.

Frans Waterlander
pixographer

I agree with Frans. It's a focus issue, either the auto focus is turned off, or the photographer is using manual, but the viewfinder is out of focus. It could also be a problem with the focus settings within the camera. Maybe the center weighted or dynamic focus settings would work better.

I opened the image in photoshop CS2 and used the high pass filter filter by first creating a duplicate layer, changing the blending mode to overlay, and then going to filder>other>high pass, and using a pixel radius of no more than 4.0 good results considering the photo was blurry in the first place.