You can say that here, but not on the sidelines of either the Rugby clubs or the American Football clubs in Cork ...
As on onlooker, the American game is far more formalised, and perhaps has less tactics to introduce. One cross over area is the kicker, and our own Ronan O'Gara was thought to be considering a switch stateside in that role at one time.
Alistair Watson wrote:
This is American football without the padding!
AGeoJO wrote:
Great shots there, Alistair! Are you using the expansion AF points since you feel they would track focus better then? That has been my prefered setting, too. What lens are you using, BTW?
Joshua, my primary rugby lens is the 400/2.8 IS but I always keep a 70-200/2.8 IS around on a 2nd body for when the action is right in front of me.
With my 1D2N I would always use a single point, either centre or top centre. I never felt the need to use expand since the camera did an excellent job of focussing with just one point. With my 1D3 I find myself using expand much more to get the same results. I know rugby is a tough game to photograph due to the time of year and that everything happens incredibly quickly and the photographer has a split second to acquire the target and then rely on the camera to lock and track. I find my hit rate with the Mark 3 is substantially improved by using circle surround.
However, like Wickedfn4u says, there is a downside to using circle surround for rugby since the players are often very tightly packed. If I have 3 players struggling for the ball, centre AF is on the one I want to target, the players to the left and right are covered by the expand point, at this point it is up to the AF to decide which one offers the best chance of a lock. And like WickedFn4u says, at f2.8 DoF is very slim so there is very little margin for error.
I was flipping between no expand and surround expand during the game but for the next match I will try to shoot no expand in the first half and surround expand in the second and look at the results.
Don't get me wrong, the AF on this blue dotter is great, a big improvement from the previous bodies. I guess I need to either tune it to do what I want with no expand or just accept that I have to use expand for rugby.
Now that I have a MkIII that 'works' in AI Servo, I'm now interested to play around with CP+expansion settings, and see if the 'ring of fire' works. I know none of those settings tended to work very well 'pre-fix', but now I'm hoping that these other settings will become usable again.
Alistair, let us know how CP vs. CP+expansion works for you.
Naw! These guys make American footballers look like wussies..
Alistair Watson wrote:
This is American football without the padding!
Yep Wicked fun, I primarily shoot sports using centre point but I find myself using circle surround much more with the 1D3 than I ever used it on the 1D2N. Perhaps this is indeed the price we pay for lower light focussing ability.
From the little American Rugby that I have shot I would think using the expansion would be a real issue. Too many focusable subjects inside of the ring too often I would have thought. Also, if you are trying to lock on the face I'm not sure I want my camera deciding it wants to focus on a jersey. I haven't used the expansion points enough to get a real feel for them so if these are unwarranted fears I would love to know.
