A set of modal parameters of a stay-cable have been extracted fi:on a moving picture captured by a digital camera supported by shaking hands. It is hard to identify the center of targets attached on the cable surface from the blurred cable motion image, because of the high speed motion of cable, low sampling frequency of camera, and the shaking effect of camera. This study proposes a multi-template matching algorithm to resolve such difficulties. In addition, a sensitivity-based system identification algorithm is introduced to extract the natural frequencies and damping ratios from the ambient cable vibration data. Three sets of vibration tests are conducted to examine the validity of the proposed algorithms. The results show that the proposed technique is pretty feasible for extracting modal parameters from the severely shaking motion pictures.