[DVaughan007]

Hey all,

Recently took pictures of my brothers soccer/football semi finals with the Da* 50-135. Had a few AF misses but found spamming the [Pentax K-5] AF button with 'multi focus-point selection' worked much better at tracking. I trialled maintaining the centre point on the subject but found I was getting much less accurate focus. Due to the fast paced movement I found the centre point was unable to keep up with the player.

Using TAv mode was great. I set the iso parameter's to float between 100-400, varying my shutter speed and aperture. Aperture worked well at f/3.2 - f/3.5. Love the subject isolation! Used a combination of shutter speeds around 1/1200th - 1/800th.

I have the Grand Final next weekend and I'm planning on selling some pic's to parents via digital download. Is this a good idea?

Also what's your technique for shooting sports with our Pentax Autofocus systems?

Here's a few of my shots from the weekend. Applied a vignette to a few of them along with a touch of the clarity slider in lightroom 4. I don't like adjusting them too much but thought it looked ok... Cheers for any input people of Pentax&Ricoh

Attachment 186140



Attachment 186142

[Pentaxtic]

Very good! Like the sharpness and isolation with bokeh.

[Sandy Hancock]

I think you're doing just fine. Multi-point AF and TAv is the way to go.

[AussieTrev]

Just a thought from something I read on a photo site. With fast paced sport try pre focusing in manual focus mode and then shoot in burst mode as the action passes through the focus spot. The advise was from a fairly good professional photographer, just can't remember which site it was.

[Louicio]

Nice job!

[DVaughan007]

Cheers Trev, I will give pre-focus technique a go next weekend.

[Mazhe]

Very nice, did you had to crop much for those results? I really like the color tone of the DA*, sadly I went with the sigma 70-200 f/2.8 (a few pics bellow) for more reach for now, and FF capacity in the future...

I tend to use only central point in continous mode, follow players and then crop to reframe the scene.

[Rob22315]

Nice shots.

I find even my K-01 with the 80-320mm does OK with sports if I pre-focus and shoot 3-4 frame bursts. Also, sports shots are much more interesting if the players eyes are visible. Shots of player's backs are usually poor unless some incredible action is there.

[DVaughan007]

Hey ,
Not really much cropping required. Some of the other shots I took on the day did require some cropping. I was on the sideline and at half time swapped sides. I found that to get shots of the players looking in my direction I needed to be at the goal ends as opposed to the sideline. This was a little problematic because that also increased the required focal length to get in close.

I will be borrowing a friends Da* 60-250 to see how it performs over the next week.

I have heard the Sigma 70-200 Autofocus is pretty zippy. That would be pretty handy!

Cheers for the input!

This was the most major crop I did. (Crop on left, Original on right)