You may have already noticed that when you’re outside on a sunny day using the Sports/Action mode to take pictures of your child playing soccer or your pet catching a Frisbee, that you get these great action images that are worthy of submission to Sports Illustrated Magazine. But when you go inside and take photos of a basketball game with the same camera in the same “sports mode”, you get images that are only worthy of being erased before anyone else sees them.
The main ingredient that’s missing in the indoor photos is “light”. The light inside a gym during a basketball game is minimal just as it is during a football game or soccer game after the sun goes down. Most of your sports/action photographs will be taken in available light. Flash isn’t always allowed and there’s also an effective range of your built-in flash (10 to 15 feet) that isn’t conducive to taking action shots from the stands.
Taking a photograph of a moving subject without a flash under low light conditions can result in blurry pictures. The problem lies in the way that exposure works; the lower the light, the slower the shutter speed that the camera needs to make a correct exposure. The slower the shudder speed, the more chance that the picture will be “blurry” because of camera movement or subject movement.
If you own a camera capable of changing lenses, you can purchase a “fast” lens. A fast lens has a wide aperture opening that allows a greater amount of light in at one time and a faster shutter speed under lower light. A fast lens is more expensive and you may not want to pay the price or you may have a point & shoot camera and cannot change the lens.
One way to get around the limitation of a camera lens is to increase the sensitivity of your electronic film (sensor) to light. When shooting with film, you can choose different “speeds” of film. This speed or sensitivity to light is measured by the “ASA” rating of the film. Film with an ASA rating of 400 is much more sensitive to light than film with an ASA rating of 100. Using film with an ASA rating of 400 will allow you to obtain higher shutter speeds under lower light conditions but will increase the chance of your photos having a “grainy” appearance. The speed of your digital film (sensor’s sensitivity to light) can be adjusted through a menu setting. This menu setting is called the ISO speed. The higher you set the ISO speed, the more sensitive the sensor will be to light and the faster the shutter speed that you’ll be able to use under lower light conditions. There’s a trade off, however. When you increase the speed or sensitivity to light, you increase the chance for getting “digital noise” or a grainy look to your photos. The result is that the higher the speed or ISO number, the grainier your photo will appear. With most digital cameras, you can shoot at ISO speed 800 and below and you probably won’t see much digital noise. After ISO speed 800, the noise will probably increase and continue to increase as the ISO increases. If you have to shoot at the higher ISO speeds, you can reduce the amount of noise in your images through special noise reduction software. Some of the most common software is Noise Ninja and Neat Image. Some photo enhancing software packages such as Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 also have the ability to reduce digital noise.
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