I got an Olympus Camedia,770-C, 10X, 4.0 MP, Ultra Zoom so I could take pictures of my son's baseball games. They turn out OK most of the time, but when it starts to get dusk to nighttime and with the field lit up all the way around, I'm having a very hard time trying to figure out how to get good action shots. Either their whole bodies are blurred or just their feet or their arms when pitching. And let's not forget that 2nd base is really out there. I need to see through the dust if that player,s foot actually touched the base before the opponent caught the ball. IF they play during the day, I can sometimes get good enough clarity to see the ball just before it hits the bat [at 90 miles per hour]. These are the kind of pictures I want. I have found that using sequential shooting gets me the best. This afternoon and into the night, all the pictures of their first game was blurry. I'm I asking too much out of this camera? If I need a different one, what do you recommend. [And by the way, we WON the game]....2son
Action shots are best caught with proper film and shutter speeds. Check your manual to see if you are able to adjust these settings. Also find out if you sre able to capture to a RAW format as this gives you the greatest control over your shots. Im not familiar with that camera, but I wll check it out on the web and reply back if you like. I use a Minolta 7HI camera, shooting in RAW mode gives me a 10MP photo with a 5 MP rated camera. The ccd in the 7hi is a 10 mp ccd and the captures are being combined down to a 5mp photo. Capturing at RAW makes huge files, but it retains everything the 10 mp vvd vaptures. Ive found I been able to print any size with this camera with no distortion. So far I made a 4 by 5 foot print without any artifacting. It pays to know whats inside. This camera has a "PROFESSIONAL" setting. Using that usually properly uses the right film and shutter speed plus proper lighting tech. But I have found that I had to use the manual settings more during dusk and dark photo shoots. Using a 200 to 400 ISO is usually best but the best way is to take a series of action shots with every ISO setting your camera provides plus adjusting the shutter speed on various shots to get the feel of what it does. Gopefully I havent added to your problem, Happy Photo Shooting!! -ZoWillie-
Your camera has decent lens and ccd on it. You are able to capture to uncompressed Tiffs (hghly rec.) and you can change you shutter speeds anywhere from to 16 to 1/1000 of a sec. (Good enough for action shots) There are 12 different shooting modes also, see if there is an professional or an axtion mode, try them first. Use its auto setting for lighting and set your shutter speed starting at 1/1000 and take a series of action shots starting at 1/1000 using stadard jumps up to 1/3 or 1/2 second and see what works best for you. If your in the market for another camera Minolta,Nikon, Canon and Olympus make awesome cameras, when looking look at pro-sumers models to professional models. Nikon D70, Canon EOS, Minolta 7hi (due to ccd), etc... -ZoWillie-
Thanks for the advice. I'll try it this afternoon [if we don't get rained out]. Some of those pictures would have really been good if they were not blurry. Once I download from camera to Camedia and then open in Microsoft Picture It Express 7, I'm hesitant sometimes to delete those that are only a little blurry. Would be nice to have a button to press that would fix some of that.
If you can use Adobe Photoshop there are a multitude of sharpening tools that will work, plus some plugins like UltraSharp and NoiseNinja. They work very well. Excessivly blurry photos can always be fixed by going pixel by pixel, a very tedious process but extremely rewarding when you finish. Let me know which photo editing programs you use and maybe I can find a decent sharpness program for you. -ZoWillie-
