s80 how to take great moving kids pictures, the kids pet section still is blurry

Canon S80 and I am trying to take pictures of my moving three children and the movement distorts the picture. It will leave a trailing red shadow or the arm won't be there and movement waves will be there. I have it on the Kids pets section or the inside section but I still am not pleased.

Hi,

With digital cameras it's very difficult to get good action shots, especially in low light and at close range. Compact digitals have a particularly difficult time with this.

The problem here is that your camera is selecting slower shutter speeds in order to let enough light into the lens to produce a good exposure. Of course, the longer the shutter is open, the more movement goes by before it closes. This results in blur in your pictures. One way to alleviate the situation is to use flash. The downside is that flash often washes images out, overexposes them, and/or lacks a "natural" look. The other way to fix it is to use higher ISO settings and to manually select faster shutter speeds. The downside here is that if the resulting images aren't woefully underexposed, they're probably very noisy (full of speckles/grain--just not very smooth). The scene modes on the S80 do these things by default, so I doubt that you manually setting the values would make that much difference.

All I can suggest is using the flash or attempting to provide better lighting if you're going to take action shots. Sorry I can't offer a better solution.

Good luck!

Thank you very much for your response.