NEED Night shots help

[shadow]

I have a Cannon G6 and I'm not a pro at all....

My problem is I can take good day time shots but the night time shots are killing me.

My daughter cheers for the local 5th-6th grade PeeWee football team and their games this year are from 8 pm to 10 pm. The lighting in most of the stadiums that PeeWee play at are not that great. Since the girls are cheer leaders they are jumping up and down and side to side etc...

So how can I get good pictures in this situation? All of my pictures turn out either dark or blurred, mostly blurred. Durring the half time shows I have to zoom in from the side line and they are in the middle of the field and get nothing but blurred pictures and that's with a tripod.

How can I get the "frozen" pictures at night with this digital camera like we used to with the 35 mm? Do I need to regress back to 35 mm in order to capture clear, crisp and non blurry pictures at night?

 

[Lan-Lord]

Hey Shadow, are you shooting in Fully Auto mode?
I will assume that you probably are

Low light shots are probably the hardest and most frustrating to accomplish. There are a couple things that you can try to get some keepers though.

What is happening is that the camera is detecting a low light situation and in order for it to properly expose the photograph, it determines that it needs to leave the shutter open for a longer period of time (as compared to daytime shots). When this happens, any movement that happens while the shutter is open will be blurred. Best thing to do here is to increase the camera's sensitivity to light. That is accomplished by raising the ISO (ISO400, ISO800). This will introduce grain/noise, but noise is better than blur. Another thing you can try (e.g. read trial and error) is to place the camera in shutter priority mode (Tv mode) and set the shutter speed to something like 1/100sec. you will need to play with that speed either up or down, but might be worth a try to freeze the action. The problem you might run into though is that in order to freeze the action, the photo may come out too dark because there was not enough light gathered during the exposure time.

 

[shadow]

Thanks, I'll give it a try. I can lighten pictures up via some software as long as they are decent pictures.