5d mk3 Indoor athletics, which AF mode?

Gary Kinghorn

Gary Kinghorn

Messages
1,517
Edit My Images
No
Afternoon all.

I'm off to do some indoor athletics work at Lee valley tomorrow and rather than taking the 1D mk3, i'm going to give the 5d a run out. Generally when I do this I focus (pardon the pun) on long jump from the pit end, sprinters and long distance coming at me and the odd side on shot from sprint starts. I was thinking that the std mode would probably do a reasonable job with most of the stuff coming at me, but thought I would ask the fountain of all knowledge which is talk photography.

Any thoughts?
 
On the 5D3 menu has 6 settings, I am unsure where and how would the athletics run, jump, running left and right or running towards you, etc... but on the 5D3 menu have little explanation on which AF you should use under what circumstances. I however do not shoot athletics but shooting birding I tend to stick with 1 custom AF that I am familiar with.
 
Started with the cross type, then moved to single point. Tried pretty much all of the focus modes settling mainly for the top versatile one. I thought the accelerate / decelerate one might have been best for long jump, but I'm not convinced that was the case.

Don't get me wrong they were very difficult circumstances. Lee valley is a dark venue with a big light source at either end. The minimum I could get away with was ISO 1000 and often much more. I went with spot metering and auto white balance was giving reasonable results.

Where I was a little disappointed was with the speed of focus and it's ability to hold the subject. I'm hoping it was me getting it wrong but I reckon with a burst of 5 shots on a long jump 1 or maybe 2 would be in, with the other 3 being out and sometimes by a long way.

Lenses used were 70-200 f2.8 and 135 F2.

Normally I would have taken my 1d mk3 and I'm gutted I didn't as I would have liked to have carried out a side by side comparison.

I'll post some images later, but in the meantime I'm hoping I have a setting out of place somewhere lol.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top