blurry basketball pics w/ S3 IS

[gunnter]

I just ot this S3 is and it has been fantastic for everything except my daughters basketball action shots.
Sports mode has been no help. I've tried playing with the shutter speed but when I get it to 1/250 the exposure is too dark to capture a good image.
Any tips would be appreciated.

[X-SOFT]

it's not your daugter faults, it's the camera.
if you have a good light source, use even higher shutter speeds, at leas 1/500

if not, try to raise the ISO settings-but as low as possibe or else you'll get digital noise..(max is 400 i recommend)

for better shooting you need dslr (especially canon- have very good low light performance)

[chrisl]

That's exactly why I'm thinking of switching to 30D or possibly an XTi

[drama]

I have been trying some high speed bird photography
Not exactly the same but some similarities do exist, Use an iso of 200 & open up the aperture 3.5 or so
I havent tried 400 yet

The light meter is not very accurate indoors
go by what you see on the viewfinder, do not use the flash, its useless for this purpose as you probaly know

try metering off static objects with similar lighting before hand
Set manual focus & practise so you can anticipate the shot beforehand
I have managed some decent results with the above, give it a try

cheers

[KSM]

it's not your daugter faults, it's the camera.
if you have a good light source, use even higher shutter speeds, at leas 1/500

if not, try to raise the ISO settings-but as low as possibe or else you'll get digital noise..(max is 400 i recommend)

for better shooting you need dslr (especially canon- have very good low light performance)
It's not the cameras fault there is not enough light. The camera is working perfectly. It may not be the perfect camera for that shot under those conditions but people should quit blaming the camera for every problem.

[reppans]

Couple more ideas:

- Shoot in bursts of continuous mode and delete the blurry pix. In BBall, there's lots of momementary pauses that could yield a great pix, like at the top of a jump shot or pivoting while dribbling. I actually love when you can catch the subject reasonably still yet with other things moving around. You'll never time it right in single shot mode.

- Don't zoom in too close and shoot at the full 6 megapixel resolution. The more you zoom in, the smaller the effective aperture, the less light you get to the sensor. If you don't plan to print large photos, you can crop the 6 megapixel pix to a 3mp 5x7 pix giving yourself effective zoom through editing. This is equivalent to Canon's "Safety Zoom" feature.

- Do a video, and then save the frames that came out good as pictures. Not much different than the first idea, but I've always thought the videos do pretty well in low light situations (But these sizes will be small, of course).

[XaiLo]

I have been trying some high speed bird photography
Not exactly the same but some similarities do exist, Use an iso of 200 & open up the aperture 3.5 or so
I havent tried 400 yet

The light meter is not very accurate indoors
go by what you see on the viewfinder, do not use the flash, its useless for this purpose as you probaly know

try metering off static objects with similar lighting before hand
Set manual focus & practise so you can anticipate the shot beforehand
I have managed some decent results with the above, give it a try

cheers


drama, that seems like an awful lot of work. lol :D

[drama]

XaiLo:
True :D

I also wanted to add the stuff reppans said but stopped for the above reason :D