Make Object smoothly follow player if out of near range

I just wrote a script that lets an object follow the player at all times if the player is a certain range away from the object (to be used as a camera target object). It basically works just the way I want it to work but the movement is a bit jittery and I have no idea why. I tested a bunch of different ways to do it and even though this one works I'm sure there is a much better way to do it... I'm fairly new to unity so I wouldn't actually know -.-

Anyways, the script moves the gameobject towards the target(player) when the player is farther than 0.75 Units aways ... so effectively the camera only starts to move when the player moves at least that amount in any direction.

Heres what I've got so far:

 using UnityEngine;
 using System.Collections;
 
 public class CameraTargetFollowPlayer : MonoBehaviour {
     
     public float targetDistance = 0.5F;
     public float smoothTime = 10;
     public Transform target;
 
     private float distance = 1F;
 
     Transform temptarget = null;
 
     void LateUpdate () {
     
         transform.LookAt(target);
         
         distance = Vector3.Distance( transform.position, target.position) ;
 
 
         // reset if its too far away
         if (distance > 7) {
             transform.position =  target.position-transform.forward;
         } else {
             
             if (distance > targetDistance) {
                                 
                 transform.position = Vector3.Slerp( transform.position, new Vector3 (
                     target.position.x-(transform.forward.x*targetDistance),
                     target.position.y,
                     target.position.z-(transform.forward.z*targetDistance)
                     ),
                     Time.deltaTime * smoothTime
                 );
                 
             } else {
                 // if distance isnt big enough to move the target we still need to adjust the y height every frame
                 transform.position = new Vector3(transform.position.x, target.position.y, transform.position.z);
                 
             }
             
         }
 
         
     }
     
     
 }