I'm really enjoying my Canon powershot S400--the only problem I seem to be having is that a lot of shots are somewhat blurry. I have narrowed this down to a couple of reasons:
1. The camera is really small and compact and sometimes when I press the shutter I must be moving the camera.
2. If the subject is moving at all, then the picture is very blurry.

According to Canon's website, blurry pictures can be eliminated by increasing the camera's shutter speed. The book on my camera says to do this by increasing the ISO. It also says that the higher the ISO, the more noise you get in the picture. What would be a reasonable setting? I don't want a lot of digital noise, but I want to be able to capture a bit of movement as well. I am not planning to photograph sporting events or anything like that. Just wiggly granddaughters!

Thanks for any advice.

But, I was able to get shots out of the mvoing bus with my digital camera. (the delay is a little distracting, but the pictures came out okay).

Hi there,

I'm not sure what your camera settings range between, but mine does ISO 100 to ISO 1000

Generally I keep it at ISO 200, but wind it up for cloudy days and low light, and down to 100 for really bright days or shots with a tripod.
You'd be hard pressed to notice any difference in 6"x4" prints between ISO 100 and ISO 400 - even ISO 800, above that you may start to notice a little "graininess"

Really, the only way to tell is take four or five shots in the same light conditions and put a notepad in the shot with the settings you've used for comparison.

Each picture file actually has most of your camera's settings recorded inside it (the exif data I think it's called)
This is useful as you can go back over particularly bad shots and try & work out what went wrong. If you have windows XP, doing a right-click on the file and go to properties\advanced you can see what's happening - otherwise you can get several shareware programs that look at this info.

just make sure you're comfortable with what it does before you go away...

Your camera has a setting for scene type: scenic, people or closups. When shooting the children, be sure the setting is at people-it chooses the widest acceptable lens opening and the fastest speed for the metered light. It's the button on the back that has mountains and a tulip next to it.

Glenn
www.pbase.com/gsrunyan

Wow, Glenn, you know more about my camera than I do! It looks like I need to study my manual more to get really familiar with it. Seems like since I got the camera I just haven't had time to really sit down and work with it. Fortunately, (or unfortunately perhaps) I'm not planning to travel for a few months so have lots of time to work out the bugs.

Thanks all of you for valuable input. I will try all of the suggestions this weekend and let you know the outcome.

Unfortunately, I think the tulip in this case is for the macro mode. If that's true, I don't think it will help with the shutter speed. Some cameras will use a figure that looks like someone running to indicate the desire for faster shutter speeds. I don't think this one does but check anyway. Definitely do as Joseph suggests & try higher ISOs. You'll never know if you find the noise acceptable until you try. If you should take a killer picture but with too much noise, there is noise reduction software available (Neat Image is one, IIRC). The old standby for small camera steadiness (other than tripod, monopod, stringpod, bean bag, etc.) is to use the optical finder when shooting (instead of the LCD screen) so that you can jam the camera into your face to steady it. Here's a link that refers to holding small cameras.

http://www.geocities.com/jpmccormac/tips.html

I hope something works out. That camera has really had some excellent reviews.

Mike

Just had another thought. See if the camera has a burst or continuous shooting mode. If you can fire off 3 or 4 shots at a time, you may find one that is sharper than the others. That will, of course, play hell with your memory card capacity until you delete the extras, but it might do the trick (unless flash is needed for each shot).

I have been doing some experimenting with my camera. I increased the ISO and tried Bob's suggestion of taking pictures outside on a sunny day in the auto mode. A dramatic improvement! I took pictures of my cat playing around and they came out quite sharp. Thanks everyone for your help.