How do you fix this? First, set your tripod and camera combo at a comfortable height - Fig. 1. This means when standing the tripod legs are extended enough for you to stand up to the cameras eye-piece without stooping over. Place your feet shoulder width apart so they're a good foundation for the rest of your body. With the camera at eye-level and your feet comfortably apart, you are what I like to call the lowest energy state you can be. This stance requires very little muscle effort or energy. It's naturally you're most steady stance.

Next, put your eye up to the eye-piece and look in, don't touch the lens or camera yet. Nothing is moving yet and everything is rock steady. But, you can't shoot anything if for no other reason than you aren't touching anything.

Now comes the next step.

Take your right hand and grasp the camera. With your left, grasp the top of the lens and push down slightly--counter the tipping tendency with pressure from your right hand. Finally, mash your eye-brow into the eye-piece - Fig. 2. Now, you are attached to your equipment. How much pressure you place between your hands and eye-brow is totally dependent on what's comfortable and minimizes movement.

Look through your eye-piece to assess camera shake.

Be very critical. If you see slight movement, change the pressure with your hands and eye-brow to see if you can reduce the shake. The whole time you're doing this, check to see if you're straining any muscles. If you are, you're straining/trying too hard and potentially causing movement when you're trying to eliminate it. Keep practicing this until the stance just becomes uncomfortable. Repeat this a few times. You'll find with a little practice it's really easy to eliminate most if not all camera movement. Remember be very critical when looking through the view finder. After a while, you'll see slight movements and figure ways to change the pressure between your hands and eye-brow to eliminate this movement.

Eliminating Movement Due to Camera Shake

This subject is very much misunderstood in the photography world. When the camera fires and mechanically operates, it causes the entire lens camera combo to vibrate to some degree. Even if you aren't touching the lens, if the camera functions and operates, it will cause the vibration, causing the subject to shake in the view finder, thus making your subject less than tack sharp. Can you see this? No, that's because this happens very quickly and the mirror happens to be up blocking your view of the world. Movement due to camera shake happens during the exposure.

Is this a big deal? It can be.

With the longest lenses and slow shutter speeds, this kind of movement maybe the exclusive cause of your blurry subjects. Here's another little tidbit related to this kind of movement. If the shutter speed is fast enough, the camera shake isn't big enough to be seen just like faster shutter speeds tend to freeze small subject movements. On the other hand, if the shutter speed is super slow, the vibration tends to dampen out to nothing. What I'm alluding to is there's a sweet spot--a range of shutter speeds--where camera related vibration has the greatest effect on tack sharp images. In most circles--hands off your equipment--this range is between 1/25th to 1/10th sec. If you were shooting without touching your equipment, this means you should be able to avoid the affects of camera vibration by avoiding the range between 1/10sec to 1/25sec. Sounds pretty simple doesn't it?

But that's not how you shoot. In real life you shoot with your hands on your gear. What do you do then? The common assumption with good long lens technique is by having your hands on your gear, that tends to stop this vibration. Actually, all it does is dampen the vibration which isn't quite the same has stopping it. All you're doing from the mechanical engineering sense is with your hands and eye-ball set to your gear you're changing the structural characteristics of the equipment and changing the characteristics of the vibration. Essentially to cause camera induced vibration when you're attached to your gear, the mechanical movement of your camera has to vibrate you and all your gear to make anything vibrate.

That being said, just the act of adding your hand to the lens tends to reduce this camera induced vibration. So, if you can keep the combo steady enough, you actually are stabilizing the lens more by having your hands attached to it verses just letting it "shake" out there in the wind.