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I’m using a bridge camera Fujifilm s7000. I’ve found it difficult to take photos indoors in low light conditions. The exposure looks right but blurred. I’m trying to take photos of our baby, as you can imagine a moving subject.Aperture priority mode f2.8 and no chance to use a flash.Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
https://www.fujifilmusa.com/shared/bin/S7000Manual.pdf
Indoor :
Outdoor (through my car windscreen) :
All the above seek to change the exposure tradeoff so that you can use a faster shutter speed. That results in less motion blur for the same motion of the subject.
From the information provided in your comments, it sounds very much like the shutter speed was too low, possibly because your ISO was too low and the subject was moving faster then the shutter, hence the blur.
I'd suggest increasing ISO and shutter speed.
Point of note. The light may seem OK to a human eye, but an eye is considerably more sensitive then a camera.
I’m using a bridge camera Fujifilm s7000.
This is the root of your problem. The S7000 was announced in 2003, and discontinued in 2005. And while the camera might work just as well as it ever did, digital cameras have evolved significantly over the last 15 years, and that has changed our expectations of what we should be able to do with them.
The other answers here are right: adding ambient light or flash and turning up the camera's ISO setting to make it more sensitive are about all you can do in order to get a reasonable exposure at a shutter speed that'll reduce the motion blur you're currently seeing. At the S7000's highest setting of ISO 800, you're probably going to get some very noisy images.
Using a newer camera will go a long way toward solving the problem. Even a relatively cheap point and shoot camera will significantly outperform your S7000 in every way, possibly for less money than the cost of an external flash. For example, the Sony DSC-W800 gives you a 20 megapixel sensor that shoots up to ISO 3200, and includes image stabilization for under $90. I'm not necessarily recommending that camera -- a different choice might make more sense for you, and it's a little dated itself -- but it illustrates the point, which is that cameras have advanced so much since the S7000 that replacing your camera is probably the best and cheapest option.
No camera will take a good photo if you don't give it enough light; conversely, if you give have enough light, you can probably get a good shot even with a pretty old camera. But over the last 15 years, our expectations of how much light is enough have changed because cameras have improved so much.
Addendum:
The examples you posted don't show much blur from motion. The plant stem in the indoor image looks pretty sharp; it's only the leaf in the foreground and the doorway in the background that are blurry. That's just shallow depth of field, and it's expected when you use a wide aperture. If the goal is to get more of the foreground and background objects in focus, then a newer camera with better low-light performance would still help because higher ISO would let you use a smaller aperture.
It's hard to tell what was supposed to be in focus in the outdoor shot, and the fact that you took it though a windshield doesn't help. The streetlight in the middle of the shot looks like it might be in focus, but it's hard to tell because it's so small. The biggest defect, though, is that there's a lot of chromatic aberration: there's a sort of magenta glow on the right edges of the tree branches, and a green glow along the left edges. Part of that is just the quality of the lens, but you can often reduce CA by shooting with a smaller aperture. A cheap compact camera might not do any better here, but a DSLR with a good lens would.
Images need a certain amount of light.
This is given by lens, shutter speed, aperture, sensitivity of film/sensor, and available light at all.
if your images are blurred you need a shorter shutter time, this you can compensate with the other parameters. if some paramters are fixed (available light) the remaining need to be altered.
Others have given the ISO, but you also can try to change aparture and maybe lenses. So changing the aparture change depth of focus you need to be more precise with positioning.
Or you get lenses with a wider diameter, they gather more light.
Since no one's directly answered the question about why the photos are blurred, let me explain it here since it sounds like you are new to photography.
The exposure of a photo is determined by the total amount of light that accumulates on the image sensor. If the exposure is wrong, the photo will be either too dark or too light. If the exposure is right, the photo will be the correct brightness.
There are three factors that affect exposure, and together they're called the "exposure triangle". These factors are:
You say that your exposure "looks right", which makes sense because the camera looks at the parameters that you've given (aperture) and chooses the other two (shutter speed and ISO) based on the amount of available lot. What went wrong is that the camera chose a shutter speed that was too long for the subject in question, so it appeared blurred. When photographing moving subjects, it's best to use the shortest (fastest) shutter speed possible.
With the camera in question there might be little that you can do. It sounds like you're already using the largest aperture, so the only two parameters that you can adjust are shutter speed and ISO. I don't know what ISO you're using, or if your camera lets you choose one manually, but your only real option if you can't use another camera (or increase the amount of available light) is to increase the ISO. Of course increasing the ISO will increase the amount of noise so look carefully at the resulting photos to check that you're happy with them.
Your best option is probably to just increase the amount of light. Move to a brighter location (possibly outside), turn more lights on, if you don't want to use a flash then get some additional lights (desk lamp, standing lamp, etc.). It's also possible that you're experiencing some camera shake (although this sounds unlikely) so it might be worth giving a tripod a try if you've got one, or putting the camera down on a flat surface if you haven't got a tripod.
