S400 and moving subjects

[gdufour]

Hi,

I'm pretty new to digital photography. I just bought my S400 a few weeks ago.

I don't know how to handle moving subject with the S400.

I guess this camera is not the best one to do this but maybe someone could help me to deal with manual settings.

Let's say I want to take outdoor shots of people playing football. Actually all the shots of that kind (I mean with moving subject) I took until now are quite bad.

Can you help me ?

[Guillermo Freige]

Regrettfully, you are right. You probably have the wrong camera for those shooting situations, but there is some tricks to do.
The S400 "manual" mode (I think this mode name is a bad joke from Canon), has nothing to do with the "photographic" settings, except exposure comp, so you can't choose shutter speed or aperture. As far as I know, the S400 even lack the "image modes" as the preprogramed "portrait", "fast shutter", "slow shutter" modes of the A70/S50/G5, so there is no way to tell to the camera you want the fastest shutter possible.
These are no such bad news, because the digicams usually chooses the largest aperture possible, which means it also chooses the fastest shooter speed possible too.
If you want to get even faster speeds, you can, in "manual" mode, choose a higher ISO setting, not the "auto" one. Try with 200 or 400 and check if the image is sharp enough for your needs. Of course this will increase the noise, so choose the lowest ISO possible that yields good results.

Guillermo