I have a canon sd700?

Question

and its not taking great night shots, should i put it on a certain setting? I tried taking pictures of the city and its not really showing great, its kind of just dark adn blurred

Answer 1

Night shots are difficult with point and shoot.

Try switching to Night snapshot mode (see your manual how you could set that)

Second thing you could try is changing ISO value to a higher number like 400/800, you have know that this might make your picture look noisy i.e it may have some grains.

Best option would be to mount your camera on a tripod or place it on a stable surface and take a shot.

Answer 2

If you don't have a tripod you mst set the camera down,you can't hold it steady enough. Set the ISO to it's highest setting,disable the flash and use the self timer to take the picture.

Answer 3

Well, your camera is really not the top choice for night shots to start with.

However, let's try to work with what you have, as I suspect you are not about to run and buy an SLR anyway...

So, first thing you should put your camera on is a tripod. Really can't do without it. the cheapest one will do. Can get one at walmart for $15, or even one of these mini-tripods. Just find a surface to put it on.

You may be able to get away with putting it on a table a rock or another steady surface, but you won't have much angle control then.

Second, put it on manual mode. Then set it to ISO 100 or 200, not more. Because at higher ISO's you'll get too much noise. I'd go with 100. Then when in manual mode, open up aperture (tha't f-number denoted by either fXX or f/XX where XX is a number). The smaller number the larger the aperture. So set it to smallest possible. Then mess with shutter speed. Start with 1 second (it should say 1" - with quotation mark, or "1 sec" on a screen). Not a fraction like 1/10, 1/100, etc.

Make sure the flash is off. You don't want it firing. It will not reach the city anyway. There should be a flash button on your camera with lightning bolt mark on it. Keep pressing it until you get a crossed lightning bolt icon on a screen. Or consult your manual as to how to disable flash.

Trigger your camera by remote control if you have it, or set it on self timer, so that you don't move it even a slightest bit when pushing a button. After taking a shot, look how it came out. Too dark? Increase the shutter speed (make it 1.5, or 2 or 3 seconds, keep on increasing). Just keep in mind, very long shutter speed will again introduce noise into your images. That's the pitfall of your camera, there's really little you can do about it. If pictures come out too light - then try increasing shutter speed - that means moving to fractions, like 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, etc.

Well, that's about it. Keep on trying, and maybe you'll get something decent at the end. It should definitely be better than what you are getting now, based on your description.

LEM.