by Stephen Canning Here's How to Capture the Action.
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Avoid blurry action photos by using these 3 tips.
Even in low-light situations? Use your flash to freeze the action. One of the challenges of photography is that when there isn't much light, your camera has to use a slower shutter speed in order to gather enough light to make a picture. This is fine with still subjects, as long as you can keep your camera steady, but with moving subjects, it means that their motion will be blurred.
An easy way around blurred moving subjects is to use a flash. Shoot your moving subject with a quick burst of flash while your camera is on a slow shutter speed setting. The flash will light up your subject for an instant, and during this instant there will be enough light reflecting off of them to make a photograph. The effect is the same as using a faster shutter speed: you only expose the film or CCD to the light reflecting off the subject for a brief amount of time.
The longer shutter speed gained by this method will then capture enough light from the background to fill in the rest of the picture. One by-product of this process can be a bit of a "ghost image" caused by the long shutter speed capturing part of your subject outside of the burst of the flash. However, this is often a stylish and interesting effect. Another option in this situation is to use a very fast film (ie1600) or adjust your digital ISO setting to a faster speed, which will allow you to use a faster shutter speed.
