How to Capture Action Shots

You always thought that your digital camera can’t take motion shots as the camera almost takes a second to capture an image and the action is missed. Thus you refrained from taking action shots and limited your digital camera to taking pictures at gathering and parties.

Good photos are always taken by fine photographers and not the camera itself. Though your camera has umpteen shortcomings, especially when it comes to capturing action shots, you can still master a few techniques that will beg you to differ. Some common flaws that digital cameras inherit is the shutter lag, limited shutter speed, write (image saving) time of the camera.

The shutter lag is the time taken by the camera to capture a shot. Usually a film camera takes a photo instantaneously in milliseconds, but digital camera takes almost a second to take a photo. Fast moving action like speeding cars, cricket match or tennis game have continuous movement which is not possible to capture the right shot if the shutter lag is one second. Thus you need to give time for the camera to get prepared for the shot. You can press the shoot button halfway, this way it takes the required focus in place if it is on automated mode. Then you click all the way it captures the picture with a reduced shutter lag. This way you can get some good moving pictures.

All digital cameras, digital SLR cameras and camcorders have a shutter speed control. Some have higher shutter speeds like 1/8000 seconds while some have as low as 1/640. With a higher shutter speed you can easily take good action shots but with the lower ones it is a problem. With the higher ones you need to also look out for the digital noise levels in the shot, you can take a shot with several shutter speeds and select one which serves your purpose. With low shutter speed cameras you can still take good action stills by using the panning methodology. You need to follow the object you need to picture even after you have taken the shot. This will enable a sharp focus of the object with a blurred background giving an excellent picture.

Most digital cameras directly save photos onto the memory card which consumes lot of time. If your camera has a multi-shot capability you can take series of pictures and then your camera saves them together. If your camera takes long enough to store one picture it also takes times to shoot the next one and you may miss out on the action you want to freeze. Thus the nest time you look out for a camera and intent to shoot action stills look out for the shutter speed, shutter lag and write camera time.