What am I doing wrong?

Khannie

Straight off the bat, I'd like to admit that I'm a photography muppet. I have no clue. There we go.

Ok, so a lot of my shots are ending up like this one:



(click for larger image)

even for what are still life style photos. I think I'm holding the camera more or less still. I did not use a flash on that photo. There is no shutter speed option that I can see.

The camera is a Canon Powershot s400.

All suggestions welcome.

trishw78

looks like your shutter speed is too slow. and possibly invest in a tripod it can't hurt.

Oh and tell the man in front to shift.

Calina

exposure time is 1/10 of a second. This is a laughably long time to try and keep a camera steady - in short, if it's hand held it is borderline impossible for you to be sure your hand is motionless.

If I remember rightly, most guidelines imply that once your exposure time exceeds 1/60 of a second, you're into handshake territory. So your first problem is that the exposure time is too long to hand hold without blur.

F-stop is 3.2. I don't know enough about the camera but the impression I am getting is that you're on automatic mode and the camera is working hard to get enough light in to expose the subjects correctly. So you've a relatively wide aperture, along with a slow shutter speed. The impression I am getting is that the ambiance is just too dark for what you want to do without flash. However, I don't think they welcome flashes at boxing matches. I can't see an ISO value for the shot but I'm guessing it's somewhere around the 200 mark. Not quite noisy enough for 400.

I don't know enough about your camera to know if you can change the ISO settings on it, but to do what you want to do without the camera shake, you will need to up the shutter speed which will make the photographs much darker, also not desirable.

ovidius

If you check the EXIF you would probably see a low shutter speed. The camera ,more then probably, was set on an auto mode and since you are shooting inside with no flash the cam lowered the shutter speed automatically in order to get a proper exposure. Go on manual, increase the ISO and lower the aperture value ( the lower the bigger the opening) and try not to use anything lower then 1/100 for your shutter speed. Your camera is very light and because of that any vibration is easily transfered onto your shot.

Fajitas!

You need to take more control of your camera really.

Your camera most likely isn't great with low light, especially without flash.

See what other options you have on it, like a night mode etc (I'm not too familiar with the camera)

Other than that, get in closer to the action

Khannie

Thanks for the (prompt) answers. I'll have a look at manual mode. I must admit that the pictures with the flash on actually looked darker, so that's why I turned it off....with hindsight it seems obvious that the automatic mode adjusted the shutter speed to compensate for low lighting (though the room was relatively bright).

The subjects are having their first novice thai boxing fight and wouldn't have noticed godzilla rumbling past.

edit:

trishw78 wrote:

Oh and tell the man in front to shift.

Haha.

He's one of the judges and would promptly (and I'm guessing confidently) have told me where to go.

trishw78

Khannie wrote:

He's one of the judges and would promptly (and I'm guessing confidently) have told me where to go.

ah he'd probabley Thai Kick you into the middle of next week then