action phots & shutter speed ?

[dk99]

I purchased the fuji 6500fd back in august and got some great holiday snaps. Was at a wedding the weekend and again some great pictures. The only problem was with snaps of people dancing.

They turned out very badly not in focus and not clear due to the movement. I had anticipated this and set the camera to "sports" setting as i understood this had higher shutter speed but as I said this was not he case.

Should i be changing the shutter speed manually.

Any advise for th future woul dbe appreciated.

 

[z109]

Were they indoor dancing photos? Did you use the flash?

If indoor and you weren't using the flash, there may not have been enough light to allow a high shutter speed.

If indoor and you were using the flash, then you should stick to 'flash mode' or whatever equivalent your camera has. The problem is that the flash fires at a specific speed (1/125 or 1/60 when I was learning about cameras (it wasn't this century!)), so if you don't use the flash setting, the shutter won't synch with it. You can capture action shots reasonably well using a flash as the flash sharpens all the edges and effectively freeze frames everything. The only problem is that you can end up with ridiculous body postures/facial expressions that might be softened without a flash.

 

[inigomontoya]

Wedding reception photos are notoriously tricky. Yoga has covered the main reasons. The other is that the built in flash on many cameras simply isn't powerful enough to fill the room, so you'll get shots with the first one or two rows of people really bright in the shot, and an almost pitch black background.

If you have a very steady hand, you could try using manual settings with a slower exposure to capture the ambient lighting of the room, with the flash firing. Too slow though and you might get some weird trails around some of the particularly fancy dancers, but it might be worth trying.

A more powerful external flash might be the best solution. And hold the camera above everybody's heads and shoot back down at the dancefloor, you may get better usage of the flash fire.

Also, the darker the room (and your eyes will adapt and deceive you), the harder the auto-focus will find it to lock onto an object.