Quote:
Originally Posted by blckkat
I have a Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-P92 that I purchased when they first came out (a few years ago) and have had great success with most of my outdoor photos. Turn the flash off, and it works great. My problem lies with indoor shots. I was fiddling with settings per my manual, and seem to have caused some sort of ridiculous delay. I also have the issue where 9 out of 10 pictures look gawd-awful blurred (sample below). Any suggestions? I would appreciate some help with the settings.
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Hi there,
Do you know what settings you changed? From your EXIF info (information about the photo that is recorded and stored with the image file) it appears your camera was set to use forced flash (fill-in flash) with red-eye reduction. This would explain the delay you mention as the camera first fires off a small flash burst to constrict the subject's pupils (to lessen any red-eye)
before it fires of the main flash burst and takes the shot.
The reason for your blurry photos is likely to be your shutter speed- the two shots you posted were taken with shutter speeds of 1/8th of a second and 1/13th of a second. This is simply too long a shutter speed for most people to handhold successfully (handholdable speeds actually vary according to many factors, but these really are way too slow for most).
So, what to do? First, get your camera off of red-eye reduction mode to eliminate the delay, and then dial in shorter shutter speeds to eliminate the blur. The EXIF shows that you were shooting in Manual mode- so just manually increase the shutter speed. One old rule of thumb is that your shutter speed should not be slower than the reciprocal of your 35mm focal length. So if you were zoomed to 100mm focal length, for example, you would want your shutter speed to be at least 1/100th of a second. With good technique most people can do much better than that, but it is a good place to start. (Incidentally, the
actual focal length would be less on a camera like the DSC-P92, but we need to deal with the 35mm equivalent focal length when using the "reciprocal of focal length guideline).
Hope this has been helpful and not confusing.
Kind Regards,
Brian