Take Action Photos

Manage the special challenges presented by digital cameras.

Dave Johnson

I want your feedback! Send your comments, questions, and suggestions about Digital Focus to comments@bydavejohnson.com. If you have a question that you'd like to see answered in the weekly Q&A, send it to question@bydavejohnson.com. And be sure to sign up to have the Digital Focus Newsletter e-mailed to you each week.

Feature: Capturing Action With Your Digital Camera

Everybody likes motion--even our vocabulary makes that clear. We love "movers and shakers," for instance. We describe fun friends as having "animated personalities;" the good stuff is always "up and coming." Slowpokes, like sloths and snails, have a somewhat less glowing reputation. So if motion is such a good thing, perhaps we should put a little into our photographs.

There are any number of ways to infuse your pictures with activity. For the next few weeks, let's talk about how to capture motion with your digital camera, and even how to infuse some faux motion into a picture on your PC.

Prefocusing Is Essential

If digital cameras have one characteristic that's disappointing to folks coming from film, it's the fact that they have a short delay--sometimes called a "lag"--between when you press the shutter release and when the picture is taken. People complain to me about this all the time, and unfortunately there's not a lot you can do to eliminate it entirely. But there are a few things you can do to minimize it.

It helps to know what causes shutter lag to begin with. When you press the shutter release, your camera has to do a lot of things, like focus, measure and set the exposure, adjust the white balance, and a handful of other less-interesting housecleaning tasks. You can shorten the delay by doing some of those things in advance. For example, if you can, take your digital camera out of auto-white balance mode and use an appropriate preset for the lighting you're in.

Most importantly, when you sense a picture opportunity coming up, you should press the shutter down halfway to lock in the focus, then wait for the right moment to take the shot. Then press the shutter the rest of the way to catch the action with a much shorter delay.

A side note: Are you shopping for a new digital camera? Try it out to see exactly how good (or bad) the shutter lag is. In my opinion, shutter lag is one of the most important specs, but it's rarely mentioned on the box. Try taking some pictures in the store to see whether the lag is short, like a tenth of a second, or long, like a half second or more.

Dial "A" for Action

Now that you know how to reduce shutter lag, it helps to know what camera mode is right to capture the action. Sometimes it's obvious: If your camera has a mode called action or sports, that's probably a good choice. Cameras usually indicate action mode with a descriptive icon, such as a running figure. This mode configures your camera to use the fastest available shutter speed, which accomplishes two things: a fast shutter stops action better than a slow shutter (which might allow the subject to blur) and it tends to make the depth of field short, which means the background will be out of focus so the subject comes to the fore.

Action mode isn't always the best choice, though. And depending upon the camera, it may not even be available. Shutter priority mode is a slightly more advanced alternative. When you switch to shutter priority, you dial in the shutter speed while the camera automatically picks the aperture setting to give you the right exposure.

Since you'll often be taking one-chance shots that can't be repeated, however, you need to be careful when using this mode. Some digital cameras will not let you choose a shutter speed that will under- or overexpose the scene--but many others will allow it, displaying a subtle warning in the viewfinder. If you pick a shutter speed that will create a bad exposure, usually the shutter speed or the aperture value will flash, telling you that something is wrong.

To get a good exposure, you need to find out how your camera works and keep an eye on the display. Want to test your camera? Set it on shutter priority and try to take a picture indoors. You should have no trouble setting a slow shutter speed like 1/2 second. Slowly change the shutter speed to 1/15, 1/30, and faster, keeping an eye on the display. When the numbers start to flash, you've gone too far and need to back off to a slower speed.

Here's a handy tip: Since you'll need to shoot action with a very high shutter speed, the tendency when using shutter priority mode is to underexpose the picture. The good news is that you can safely underexpose most digital pictures a little bit without noticeably degrading image quality.

Next week, we'll continue our look at action photo techniques.

Dave's Favorites: Organize Your Photos With Picasa

Walk into a movie theater, and you'll find the plot of almost any Hollywood movie built around the concept of unintended consequences. Unintended consequences abound in real life, too; consider what we deal with in digital photography. Digital cameras give us the freedom to take an unlimited number of photos without paying for film or processing, but the result--the unintended consequence--is that those pictures quickly number into the thousands and become difficult to manage.

Picasa is a free image organizer that can tame your digital clutter. What makes it so great? Without a doubt, it's the program's timeline mode. This displays your images on a sort of chronological carousel that you can spin around using the arrow keys on your keyboard. You see the date and thumbnails of the pictures, and you can double-click anywhere you like to launch a slide show of pictures from that time period.

I'm also totally jazzed by the handy Picture Tray (a holding area at the bottom of the screen) in the program's more traditional album mode. As you locate images in your albums, you can hold them in the tray and later act on them all at once--to print, e-mail, share, and so on.

Picasa has strokes of genius, but it's far from perfect. The timeline mode's thumbnails are so blurry they look like they were rendered using a French Impressionism filter. And to add insult to injury, the timeline mode doesn't connect to the ordinary album mode. You can't locate a set of pictures in the timeline and then add them to the Picture Tray, so they may as well be two separate programs.

Nonetheless, Picasa is still well worth checking out, especially given the price. I have great hopes for the upcoming version 2.0. You can download the current version from the company's Web site.

Q&A: Why Are My Digital Pictures So Large?

I am new to digital photography, and recently discovered a problem with downloading pictures from my camera to the PC. The problem is the file sizes are so huge. Each picture takes up megabytes, not kilobytes like the other image files that I have in my PC. Is there any way I can download the pictures differently to make them smaller?

--Bebe Zebib, Toronto

You can use the settings on your camera to control the size of your pictures before they're taken, Bebe. Just check the camera's user guide for details on how to change the settings.

Most people want large image files because they create high-quality pictures that can be printed at large sizes. And by default, most digital cameras tend to shoot at their best resolution. It sounds like this is what your camera is doing.

If you don't care about printing your pictures, you can tell your digital camera to capture smaller, low-resolution pictures that have fewer pixels in them, or to use more compression, which results in lower-quality, grainier images. If you only look at pictures on your computer screen and never print them, you can probably get away with really small picture files.

Unfortunately, though, you can't have it both ways. Either you get high-quality pictures that take a lot of space, or smaller, low-quality images. With the huge size of most modern hard drives, space isn't much of a concern, so most people live with the bigger files to preserve image quality. But that's something you'll have to decide for yourself. If you do continue to download big pictures, remember that you can shrink select images down to a smaller size if you want to share them via e-mail.

Hot Pics

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This Week's Hot Pic: "Looking Out," by Rob Timmins, Altoona, Iowa

About this week's Hot Pic, Rob says: "I took this photo of my daughter at our local pool while I was trying out my new digital camera, an Olympus C-765 Ultrazoom. I liked how the inner tube framed her face, as well as the details of the water drops. There's also some great contrast among all the colors in the frame."

Hot Pic of the Month: Each month we choose one of our weekly winners to be the Hot Pic of the Month. For our September winner, we chose "Right Turn Clyde," by Scott Greninger from Phoenix.

Congratulations to Scott and to everyone else who won a Hot Pic of the Week last month. Keep those entries coming!