Foto Friday – Photos a la Mode

Our good friend Jennifer Wilson over at simplescrapper.com just ran a post about photographing fireworks and she brought out an excellent point – what about more info for the point-and-shoot camera user as opposed to the “I want one so bad it hurts I’ll sell my husband” Digital SLR user? So Jenn my DW suggested I start a series on how to use the different modes on your point and shoot cameras for better pictures and to make your point-and-shoot think it’s a DSLR. So today we’re going to look at the Sports Mode. (A note – a lot of “prosumer” DSLR’s also have these modes).

So what is the Sports mode for? Well…. it’s for shooting landscapes, right? No-It’s For Action. And note I said action – meaning anything moving. It is a great choice for anything in motion. The sports mode does a few important things for you automatically:

• It biases the camera to use faster shutter speeds to stop the action.
• It adjusts the tolerance for the autofocus to allow the camera to shoot even if it’s not 100% locked in.
• It uses image stabilization (if your camera has it) to help get better, sharper pictures.

Here are some images we took on our vacation where I used the Sports Mode:

There can be some downside though:

• Because the autfocus is more tolerant, the pictures cn be a little to very out of focus.
• The camera will boost the ISO to better stop the action, but this could cause the pictures to become grainier. (On these samples the camera sometimes boosted the ISO to 800 which on a sunny day you would not usually need).

So give it a try! The next time you’re riding a roller coaster, at your kids ball game, or photographing children (or NASCAR?) try your sports mode.

Next week we will cover…. what ever mode gets the most comments from this one! So what mode do you want to know about? Is there anything else on your digital camera I can cover?

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