Dbltfarmer
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Before basketball season I purchased a Sigma 50-100 for shooting basketball. The 1.8 aperture should give me adequate speed on my D500 to shoot in poorly lit gyms. It's been a decent lens but not as good as I hoped. At first I thought it was the F1.8 being unforgiving as far as good clear shots in a sports setting. Don't get me wrong, I have gotten great shots but my keeper rate is far below my Nikon 70-200 f2.8, Sigma 70-200, and Sigma 24-105 F4.
I have been shooting in short 3 to 5 shot bursts most of the time but sometimes longer. I shoot in Continuous Single, group and 25 point autofocus settings and try to keep the SS up above 1/750th most of the time. Again, I thought it was the F1.8 or me but as I kept shooting and trying different things it did not get better. Please keep in mind that I am shooting tighter with the 50-100 in most cases. However, I have gotten shots with the other lenses that are less than 20 ft away and nailed them. 50-100 not as well. Usually the first frame or two is good then as I follow action it looses focus. Sometimes its just the opposite. This is one of the reasons I thought the problem was me.
A couple of weekends ago I shot a Motorcycle Enduro. I try to get in a position where the riders are coming right at me and then make a turn to go around me where I can follow them and get good side shots. I shoot these in 3 to 5 shot bursts at 11 FPS. I wanted to try this lens in the enduro because of its IQ. It was a good sunny day and I wanted to get different shots with both good depth of field or shallow depth of field. I was shooting in auto ISO up to 400. As the riders started coming, I realized I was missing a lot of shots. The riders were coming at me but I just couldn't get focused on them in multiple continuous modes. I have my preview button set for continuous group and my function button set in single continuous and the back button auto in 25 point continuous. None of these worked.
I had the nikon 70-200 on my Nikon 7100 and it was nailing shots. I put up the 50-100 and put the 70-200 on the 500 and it worked much better missing very few shots.
Today I took it back to the dealer where I bought it. One guy told me to adjust it on the dock?? There is no way to adjust ianything but fine tune and manual focus settings on the dock when we tried it in the store. I then put it in low speed continuous shooting (5fps) and tried it on a busy street shooting cars coming towards me and it worked great.
Anyone have any thoughts of what the problem is?? Im wishing now that I would have purchased the Nikon 24-70 f 2.8 instead of the two sigmas which I purchased at different times for different reasons.
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