Digital Focus: Take Action Shots

Sure, action shots are tricky, but we explain how. Plus, low-priced printouts.

Dave Johnson, special to PCWorld.com

Freezing the Action

When it comes to action photography, we digital camera lovers are occasionally at a bit of a disadvantage. It's digital photography's dirty little secret: By and large, our cameras just aren't designed for fast action.

I assume I'm not blowing the lid off a huge conspiracy by admitting this in print (and if I am, well, you'll know why I don't show up for work next week). But I do meet lots of folks who are surprised--and disappointed--by their new camera's performance the first time they use it to shoot pictures of a sporting event, car race, or UFO landing.

Action settings and digital cameras don't get along for three principal reasons. And I've got some workarounds for you to try that will help you overcome each and every one of them.

Lag, Despicable Lag

My father-in-law was ecstatic when he first got his high-zoom, 3.3-megapixel digital camera. But it wasn't long before he started complaining to me about the way it performed. "It takes an entire second from the moment I press the shutter release to when the picture gets taken," he laments.

A second may not sound like much, but 35mm cameras can snap a picture within 50 milliseconds of your finger touching the button. That's virtually instantaneous. A lot can happen in a second, and if you're shooting something that moves, I can guarantee it won't still be in the viewfinder a second later. Consider a car, for instance--traveling 60 mph, it will travel almost 90 feet in a second.

Autofocus digital cameras need a short time to actually, err, focus. When you put a slight amount of pressure on the shutter release (or, as your user guide probably says, press it down halfway), the camera locks the focus on whatever you're pointing the lens at. If you can press the button and hold it partway down until you're absolutely ready to shoot, the focusing process will already be done, and the picture will be taken much faster when you finally press down all the way.

Of course, not all cameras have such long lag times, and you might want to test the shutter's response when you shop for your next camera.

Shutter Speed Limit

My 35mm SLR, a Nikon F100, has a top shutter speed of 1/8000 second. That's fast enough to stop a hummingbird's wings in flight. My digital Olympus e-10, on the other hand, has a top speed of 1/640. That's fast enough to capture honey as it flows out of a squeeze bottle. Okay, it's almost fast enough.

But that's all right, because you can still freeze the action with a slow shutter speed--you just need to master a technique called panning. Panning is all about "following through"--the same technique you hone when playing golf or tennis. Track the moving subject with your camera while pivoting your body at the hip, snap the picture, and continue moving the camera--follow through even after the shot has been taken. If you get good at it, you'll end up with a motion-blurred background and a razor-sharp subject.

Write Time

Lots of cameras take too darn long to save the picture to memory. With many cameras, you can't take another picture while the camera is busy saving the last image you took. There's really only one workaround for this glitch--get a camera that has the ability to take several images before the camera locks up for its inevitable housecleaning. Check out the Nikon CoolPix 995 or the Epson PhotoPC 3100Z.

Mini Review: Pinnacle Systems Studio Action

When I was a kid, the closest I ever got to a video production studio was watching "Land of the Lost" on Saturday mornings. Today, your kids can make their own movies with Pinnacle's new $70 Studio Action video editing program. Even more surprising is that it's a great video editor for grown-up novices as well.

The box includes a USB video capture cable for analog camcorders and DV camcorders with analog outputs. Kids ages 8 and up should have little trouble mastering the basics of video production with this program, and older kids and adults can make some impressive videos with little effort and almost no learning curve.

In editing mode, you build your movie by dragging clips to a traditional timeline that has separate tracks for video, titles, and two audio tracks. You can choose from about 70 transition effects, add titles, and generate sound effects and music. In fact, the music is really cool: Just choose a musical style--like classical, country, or rock--and the program adds a perfectly timed soundtrack. Unfortunately, Studio Action only has a single output format: highly compressed MPEG, suitable for e-mail and Web sites.

If you're looking for a program to introduce the kids to video, or a simple way to e-mail vacation movies, this is a good alternative.

Q&A: Budget Ink Cartridges

What do you think about those ink refill kits for ink jet printers? It's a lot cheaper to refill ink cartridges than to buy a new set of Epson or HP cartridges.

-- Alex Beach

You're right, it is tempting to buy a refill kit from the office supply store and inject new ink into old cartridges. I did some informal price comparisons, and it's about half the cost of getting name-brand ink replacements.

But I have a big, big caveat for you or anyone who wants to print good-quality photo images. Your ink jet printer is a more than just the mechanism sitting on your desk: Much of the engineering that went into developing your printer was all about finding the ideal ink formula to squirt though the nozzles and onto the specially formulated paper typically used for photos. For plain text printing it doesn't matter much, but printing photo-quality images depends just as much on the ink and paper as on the printer itself.

So, believe it or not, the ink really does matter. If you're going to spend a lot of money on a high-quality printer, why sabotage your printouts with generic ink that won't mix properly to generate a full spectrum of colors, then bleed, run, and fade to boot?

Send your questions to dave@bydavejohnson.com.

Hot Pic of the Week

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Here's how to enter:

Send us your photograph in JPG format at a resolution no larger than 640 by 480 pixels to hotpic@pcworld.com. Larger entries 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 of the photo 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 regs.

This Week's Hot Pic:

The Leaf by Jeffrey Lindholm

Jeffrey says: "I liked the way this leaf was floating in a perfectly clear stream. I took the shot on an Olympus D-620L. I actually took it from a bunch of angles, but I liked this shot from directly above best. On the PC, the only change I made was to increase the color saturation a little in Adobe PhotoShop."