I'm shooting with the mechanical shutter. 12fps is plenty fast for me.
I came from a 5DIII and honestly I haven't really noticed any delay in shutter or EVF lag. When I'm shooting VB I usually try to anticipate where the ball is going and pre-focus. I start shooting just before the ball arrives. I usually wind up with 2-3 frames ahead of the ball's arrival. Sometimes I follow the action to the next player and wind up with a lot of shots that are out of focus but there are usually a couple keepers hiding in there.
rscheffler wrote:
Yes, these definitely look better. Curious what shutter mode you used (electronic, mechanical...) and if you had any difficulty timing your shots due to EVF lag, etc.?
I received my lens back from Canon last week. The repair order said that the focus ring was distorted and that they replaced the focus ring and adjusted for centering and best focus.
I took some test shots and compared them to the shots I took before the lens was repaired. It does seem to be sharper than before but not quite as sharp as my BILs copy.
We have a couple matches this week. I'll report back when I've had a chance to give it a decent sampling.
Here is my R6 with my EF 70-200 2.8 IS from our first ISSMA band competition. The lens should perform very well on an R6. Hope your tests show the lens to be fully repaired now.
I'd like to say sorry for not updating this thread for a while. My daughter's team is really struggling this year. Their star players all graduated last year and now they are stuck playing in a league that's above their level. It's been hard for me to get excited about shooting when her team is getting whomped every game. I actually left the camera home the last couple games.
Anyway, I was able to shoot some live music over the weekend. I got a few pictures that I was pretty happy with.
This was my favorite image (and band) from the day. The subject and his guitar are all pretty sharp. This was from about 20' away. CJA_6850 by Chris Attebery, on Flickr
About 50% of the shots I took were a little blurry at 100%. They were mostly at 200mm and could have easily been at 300-400mm. I'm going to say they were mostly from hand shake.
Chris, what type of sharpening/noise reduction are you using for these? If you are using Lightroom, then high ISO shots (above 1600), then sharpening tends to peform better if you increase the radius slightly above 1. No camera will provide quite as sharp photos on high ISO as on low ISOs such as 100 or 200. Were you using face detection on volleyball? I noticed that it doesn't hit as convincingly if person is wearing a mask, although I shot some much younger kids and the mask was covering more of their faces. And even on daytime soccer, I found that using spot AF tends to gave me a higher percentage of razor sharp photos than using face detection.
The musician does indeed have some sort of shake, but at 1/1000 there should be little to none. Did you have IS turned on for that shot? Also what shutter mode were you in? In full mechanical, I had some pretty disturbing OOF photos from 16-35L IS at f11 in broad daylight. Switching to electronic first curtain helped quite a lot.
Milan Hutera wrote:
And even on daytime soccer, I found that using spot AF tends to gave me a higher percentage of razor sharp photos than using face detection.
I have noticed better tracking results with face detection after turning off eye detection. I still prefer face detection over single point as it lets me recompose while maintaining focus on the subject.
Yes, I understand that the sensor isn't going to be as sharp at higher ISOs. I've been using LR for Sharpening and NR. For NR I'm using the stock settings except that I turn the masking up to 90. For Sharpening I'm using 25 for Luminance and 40 for Color.
For this last set of images I used Spot, Single Point or Large Zone AF. My experience with Eye AF is that it works well when the subject fills a good percentage of the frame as in a portrait, but when the subject is relatively small it doesn't work very well or it takes a long time to lock on.
I'm using Mechanical shutter. I haven't tried the other modes. I'll try electronic first curtain tomorrow night and see how it goes.
Mike_5D wrote:
I have noticed better tracking results with face detection after turning off eye detection. I still prefer face detection over single point as it lets me recompose while maintaining focus on the subject.
Could you go into detail on how you are doing this?
ChrisAttebery wrote:
Could you go into detail on how you are doing this?
After hitting the button to select your AF type (face+track, spot, single, zone), select face+tracking and the info button toggles eye AF on and off. It can also be enabled or disabled in the AF1 menu.
My AF is set up to do eye AF and if it cannot find an eye to lock onto, it goes to face detection. This set up has been working very well for me.
I use this for sports and marching band competitions. Unfortunately many competitions are at night, so shots like this are at ISO 25600, or around that.
ChrisAttebery wrote:
I'd like to say sorry for not updating this thread for a while. My daughter's team is really struggling this year. Their star players all graduated last year and now they are stuck playing in a league that's above their level. It's been hard for me to get excited about shooting when her team is getting whomped every game. I actually left the camera home the last couple games.
They might be going through a rough phase having lost all their best players, but unfortunately that's their situation and you don't know how things are going to unfold in the future (not sure how many more years your daughter has until graduation). What might be worse is years down the road, looking back and realizing you don't have much documented from this time in her sporting life. Then again, sometimes it might be better to watch and take in some of these moments rather than viewing it all through an EVF. Maybe the trick is finding the right balance.
ChrisAttebery wrote:
I got the chance to shoot another VB game last night. I'm happier with this set of pictures.
I kind of feel like the lens is still not quite right. Look at the blur characteristics of the "sports imports" text and telephone number on the black padding in the background. The blur is smeared in one direction and not uniform.
TeamSpeed wrote:
My AF is set up to do eye AF and if it cannot find an eye to lock onto, it goes to face detection. This set up has been working very well for me.
I use this for sports and marching band competitions. Unfortunately many competitions are at night, so shots like this are at ISO 25600, or around that.
What lenses are you using? In tests and during games, I've found eye detect gives me a lot more out of focus shots than just sticking to face detect or single point AF. I use a 100-400 II and 70-200 2.8 IS II.
Based on feedback I received from Milan on LR's Detail panel I tried increasing the sharpening to 50, turning off masking completely, set Luminance to 25, and Color to 40. That helped a bit.
I realized that there just wasn't that much contrast on the girl's faces so I went back to the Basic panel and added +20 to the contrast, set Texture to +8, Clarity to +10 and Dehaze to +5.
To my eye the pictures look sharper than before. What do you think?
I shot another VB game on Wednesday. I tried using the electronic 1st curtain shutter but it didn't seem to make any difference. I tried turning off eye detection. That didn't seem to make a difference either. All of the pictures I took using Face/Eye AF were slightly out of focus.
Then I tried stopping the lens down to f/3.5. That actually seemed to sharpen up the pictures.
This is a 1:1 crop taken from 40' away. That seems pretty sharp to my eye. CJA_7324 by Chris Attebery, on Flickr
I always shoot 1/3 to 2/3 stops past wide open with my 70-200 during sports. It does two things, it gets the lens more into its sweet spot and it allows for any slight issues with desired focus vs actual FOV. I would rather deal with a tiny bit more noise than deal with less than sharp details.
TeamSpeed wrote:
I always shoot 1/3 to 2/3 stops past wide open with my 70-200 during sports. It does two things, it gets the lens more into its sweet spot and it allows for any slight issues with desired focus vs actual FOV. I would rather deal with a tiny bit more noise than deal with less than sharp details.
I shoot my kids' little league soccer games with my R + 70-200mm, and I basically set it and forget it at f/4. I find it delivers much better results than my old 70-200 f/4 did at the same settings, and I rarely want more bokeh than f/4 would deliver.
Maybe the trick is finding the right balance.
