How to prevent blurry pictures

[jonathon94]

I recently was down on the gym floor taking photography of our Christmas pep rally. Duevto me being a senior that will be my last Christmas pep rally so I went all out and I put myself right in the action. If there was an event I tried to be right on it.

When I came home I was very depressed to discover that about 95% of my photos were blurry. Let me go ahead and say that I only have a point and shoot right now so I have no control over shutter speed. I felt like I was holding the camera right in most of the shots, I tried to hold it very stable as I could.

I do believe that even with my camera I could have done something to improve those photos but I'm not sure what could have been done. Any ideas?

 

[Robin Usagani]

set it to green box, turn the flash on. Pray it will be good.

 

[analog.universe]

Which camera do you have? Even most point and shoots will let you coax a faster shutter speed out of them. Beyond a certain limit, it doesn't matter how steady you're holding the camera, you'll get some motion, and you certainly won't be able to freeze the motion you're shooting. Flash would solve your blur issues, but if the only flash you have is a tiny popup flash, you'll be limited in many other ways instead.

 

[jonathon94]

1), What is green box?

2) I have a Canon Powershot A490
And later on I thought about flash but I worried about the battery drain.

 

[analog.universe]

I see, well, I've looked up the specs on that camera, and I didn't know models were offered with so little control available to the user. It seems you're 100% limited by your equipment on this one. The green box is full auto mode... on your camera this is all you've got unfortunately.

 

[480sparky]

Is the blur due to subject movement, or camera movement?

 

[jonathon94]

It appears to be camera movement on half of them and the other half is subject motion. I believe the biggest cause of this is a slow shutter speed.

As for my camera, I have scene modes and a program mode along with the full auto

 

[Rephargotohp]

One of your scene modses is a Low light mode that sets your ISO and SS higher (still may not be enough but) try setting it to that and see if it helps (page 51 manual)

You also have P mode (Progrtam AE) in that mode you can adjust some settings. Change your ISO to high ( 1600) you may get a lot of noise, but noise is better than a blurry picture ( Page 60 - 69)

 

[bazooka]

Sounds like you should have gone with flash and brought extra batteries.

 

[jonathon94]

Towards the end I did switch to low light mode. It helped some but my issue with that is it dropped the pictures from 10MP to 2MP that's worse then what my phone does.

But this Christmas I may just get more re chargeables

 

[Dominantly]

You need a different camera/lens setup for that kind of work. There is a reason people will spend thousands of dollars on camera equipment to shoot scenes like this, vs just grabbing a point and shoot.
That area you were shooting in, is one of the more difficult scenes to shoot for even the experienced photographer.

 

[jonathon94]

I am trying to save up my money to buy a camera body from ebay for about 300 but just to afford that I will have to save both my birthday and my Christmas money

 

[gsgary]

Even with a DSLR you will still have trouble in a gym unless you have fast lenses you will also have to use high ISO