Express Action Sports

Looking for a good digital camera. What is important to me is to be able to take pictures fast (sports etc) and not have blurry shots. Not looking to spend to much but I was thinking around $300 for a good one. The other area of a camera I like to have is the zoom option. Can you help me recommend a good one? Thanks for the help.

For freezing the action for sports (especially indoor sports) you will need a DSLR camera. Point and shoot cameras have a very small image sensor, which means they do not work well in indoor lighting without a flash, and have shutter lag between the time you press the shutter button and the photo is taken (this means you will miss most of your actions shots).

In addition, you will need a fast lens for the DSLR camera to get enough light to the camera’s sensor to allow for a fast shutter speed.

Total cost of a new DSLR body and a fast lens will be anywhere from $700-$2000. Even at the $700 range, that camera will only shoot about 3 frames per second, which is pretty slow for sports action.

I have just recently acquired a Nikon D80 and I am having a few problems. When in sports mode the pics come out blurry. So I have to shoot in auto, although I am getting better in the priority modes. I shoot mainly sports. A the moment I am shooting my brother play indoor hockey. The lighting isn’t that good. So I tried in auto, the shots where still but very dark. In sports mode, it was lighter but blurry. So please help me out! But any other general advice on sports photography would be good also.

Drop the zoom, get a fast prime and shoot shutter priority. Or even manual if you have consistent night/indoor lighting and can get it dialed in.

http://www.nikonians.org/html/resources/guides/sports_101/index.html

I’m Trying to get fast moving pictures and this is a new camera to me, and I’m not sure what the best setting for this would be. If you know I would greatly appreciate it.

There is a couple of details you left out that are important…What focal length lens do you have, what are you photographing, and is it indoor or outdoor.

Generally speaking, I use a 70-200 f2.8 Vr lens for sports photography like soccer, hockey etc. Indoor lighting quite often is less than perfect, so I shoot in full manual mode then. Somewhere around 1/250th or 1/500th is good. You will need to use slower ISO and wider aperature settings to achieve this sometimes…

Outdoors on the soccer field or baseball diamond, I usually set aperture priority mode and set the aperture to f4, which is one stop from wide open on my lens. This is the sharpest setting on my lens. I set the ISO at 200 and just keep an eye on the shutter speed to make sure it doesn’t fall too low. If it does, push the ISO up to 400 or 800. Or even higher if you need to.

Sometimes you may want to keep some blur in the image to show motion. For instance…a cyclist riding past you. If you use a very high shutterspeed you will freeze the cyclist, but you will also freeze the spokes of the wheels and the bicycle is just standing there. Sometimes a slower shutter speed and panning with your subject as it moves past is best. That way you freeze the cyclist, but the wheels still show some motion.

Just as an example I photograph a lot of aircraft in flight. Helicopters with frozen rotor blades looks silly in the sky! Helicopters should be photographed usually no faster than 1/80th of a second, a propeller driven aircraft no faster than 1/125th or 1/250th or you freeze the props!

For photographing aircraft I use shutter priority and specify these speeds. The camera looks after the correct aperture for the exposure.