Express Action Sports

Choose the highest shutter speed and longest focal length your camera will support and you can forget the tripod.

You will have to anticipate the shots due to your cameras shutter lag.
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Sports photographer

The canon s2 IS has a command dial on the top of the camera. You should see little symbols such as a mountain, flower, a head, and what looks like a stick figure running. With the camera on, you’d want to use this running figure. It’s canon’s symology for "action." This setting will tell the camera that your main goal is to capture fast action shots. The camera will measure the light, and automatically choose the fastest shutter speed/ aperture combination it can depending on the light. Now, just because it is an automatic calculation, the camera isn’t "all knowing." Mistakes happen. But you can increase your chances of a successful shot by shooting with the sun to your back. Do not shoot into the sun. By shooting with the sun, your subject will be illuminated and not in shadow. This will allow you to use a fastest shutter speed for the particular level of light. If you shoot into the sun, and in an auto mode, chances are your subject will be dark and underexposed.

Another tip would be to go into your menu set up and do two things. 1) set your ISO for 200 . 2) Select the burst shooting mode.

Setting your ISO to 200 will allow the sensor to be twice as sensitve than at ISO 100. This in turn will allow for faster shutter speeds to freeze the action. ISO 400 is twice as fast as 200 BUT, because of the limitations of the type of sensor in your camera, ISO 400 pictures are often full of digital noise and not very appealing.

Another thing, make sure both the in camera lens and the telephoto lens are the cleanest you can get them. Dirt, dust, and smudges on the telephoto lens may be magnified by the in camera lens.

As was mentioned in another answer, you will have to judge the shots you take…time them with the action. The S2 probably has a little bit of delay from the time you press the shutter release button to the time the picture is actually taken. Practice with this timing issue.
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nearly 15 years of photography experience, dedicated Canon user, own two Canon fim SLRs and a Canon Digital SLR, own a small photographic image business .

Assisted modes are generally garbage.

Use your camera in shutter priority mode(S) or (Tv) then set the shutter to somewhere no lower than 1/125 of a second. faster is better. 1/250 would be great or 1/500 is super!

You might need to set the ISO pretty high to get these speeds if the lighting is poor. Flash may also be in order if you can. It looks like you’ll be too far away.

When handholding, remember the rule of thumb. If you are shooting at 100mm, you’ll need at least 1/100th of a sec shutter speed to prevent blurry from camera shake caused by you hand holding. So, if you can zoom in as far as say 300mm, then try your best to get a shutter speed faster than 1/300 sec for each of the shots.
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Since you’ve never done this before, I’d also suggest using the "Sports" mode, which is described on page 42 of your advanced manual.

If you don’t like the results and can’t analyze them yourself, come back and we can talk to you about shutter speeds and ISO and so on that the three above me have already addressed. I’m just thinking that you might not be ready for that discussion until you see some results. (No offense meant. I just have no idea what your level of experience is, but you did come here to ask for advice so that tells me something…)
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