[LaurenOE]

Well, I'm sold.

K3
Bigma at 450mm
f/6.3 ISO400 - 1/2000 to 1/1000 sec.
Katana Gimbal
RAW.

I could never have attempted a sequence like this with my K5.

Click on image to open larger version of image.



Oh, and with burst mode? 678 images for a girl's soccer game happens pretty quick!!!

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Last edited by LaurenOE; 11-10-2013 at 01:15 PM.

[Caat]

Not bad, especially considering the Bigma's AF skills are not one of its strong points!

[LaurenOE]

Not bad, especially considering the Bigma's AF skills are not one of its strong points!

Exactly!

I love how the second girl in green has the same pace, but towards the end, she "Gives up" and falls behind!

The performance of the K3 is astonishing!!!

[GaryH]

I am finding similar AF performance using the WR55-300 and K3.
My K5IIs cant compete with AF tracking

[Thornplayer]

Glad to see the K3 and Bigma get on so well.

[timcatn]

Can't see the images

[jatrax]

Lauren, what AF settings were you using? Trying to figure out the best settings for moving subjects.

[LaurenOE]

Lauren, what AF settings were you using? Trying to figure out the best settings for moving subjects.

I'm also trying to figure out what works best.

I had center point enabled which is AMAZING considering I'm not sure how much "tracking" (if any) is available in single point.
However, looking at the images, if the K3 had locked on the fence, I would think there was no tracking.
I have shutter priority enabled for shutter, so the camera will fire without focus-confirm, so that might be why too?

What it does mean, is that the K3 being so fast in locking focus (Initially), then, I was able to continue to keep things focused on target via the shutter priority and f/6.3.

Sure the Gimbal helped, but a K5 would have lost focus as things moved along.

[LaurenOE]

Glad to see the K3 and Bigma get on so well.

So far so well.

[LaurenOE]

So here are my settings.

AF.C
Center point
Maximum Burst Mode
Custom Menu 17. - Action in AF.C continuous Shooting - Option 3, FPS-Priority
Decent depth of field at f/6.3
Subject moving parallel/arc to Gimbal track.

That seems to be the trick.

[SteveB]

To be fair, they're all at much the same distance, but most Pentaxes would have slipped focus onto the wire fence so it looks like the subject colour tracking has helped here (a lot).

[LaurenOE]

To be fair, they're all at much the same distance, but most Pentaxes would have slipped focus onto the wire fence so it looks like the subject colour tracking has helped here (a lot).

I'm thinking so too.
I noticed that the shutter speed went from 1/2000 down to 1/1000 at the end of the sequence, so the camera was "thinking" as it took the images.
It could have locked on the fence, but did not.

[Ponosby Britt]

I've had good results tracking with K-5 bodies.

[dosdan]

Oh, and with burst mode? 678 images for a girl's soccer game happens pretty quick!!!

I'll definitely be upgrading my K-5 to a K-3. On Saturday I took 1700 shots in a partial coverage of a Little Athletics Regional Relays meet using a DA* 60-250/F4 & a Sigma 70-200/F2.8. Running/Hurdles/Long Jump is very much like Soccer (done a lot of that over the last 5 years, but it's the soccer off-season now). Burst mode is important in getting just the right (most dramatic) hand & leg position and facial expression for 1 or more competitors.

For me the AF hold-off capability of the K-3 (and the K5II) will be an important addition in soccer: panning two players going for goal, and a mid-field player is panned across. With the K-5, it will all ways lock on the closer (non-involved) player when this happens.

I find in Athletics shooting I often have to use centre-point to avoid the AF getting distracted, but that's hard when you're trying to cover 2 or more competitors at the same time. Having some decent AF tracking would make an enormous difference. Are you using the AF button to lock AF on the intended subject,and then letting 9-point close tracking maintain the lock? If done correctly, this may give the best result.

I find with soccer, when you're trying to document a goal attack, close rebuff, attack again and score sequence, it's not hard to fill up the 20-shot raw buffer in the K-5, because you not sure which part of the attack will succeed. The 60-shot JPEG buffer in the K-3 would be great here. Same in close shooting of Hurdles when you trying to get good shoots of all competitors (not just concentrating on the leader). I find I need to take multiple bursts per hurdle to cover all the competitors (I like to get shots of each competitor with them mid-air over the hurdle) and you can easily fill the buffer up under these circumstances.

The reason I shoot raw is that I can't trust the K-5's AE. In soccer on a bright day I have to use -0.7 EVcomp to ensure highlights are recoverable in PP. With High Jump, shot with a Pentax-A 50/F2, I position my tripod about 12m back from the centre, use 10x LV to MF in on the brand-name writing on the cross-bar, and shoot fixed-focus with 1/800s-1/1000s & f/8-f/9 to get enough DOF to cover the close part of the approach, start of the leap, approaching the top of the bar, over the bar, landing sequence. The shiny reflectiveness of the fibreglass bar means that, on a sunny day, I've got to use -1 EVcomp and still fiddle with highlight recovery afterwards. So more accurate AE in the K-3 would be a big help and might make it possible for me to use JPEG.

I believe the Bigma, due to is relatively small aperture at high FLs, is a "sunny-day" lens. It would be interesting to see if the high-sensitivity AF and AE (used to assist AF tracking) will make the Bigma usable in cloudier situations. This is in comparison to using a Bigma on a K20D or K-5 - the K5II will probably work OK.

Dan.

[dosdan]

I've had good results tracking with K-5 bodies.

Not a great example of AF tracking prowess. 1/1500s, f/9.5, ISO 800, 58mm FL. It's a bright day, but you're using a high f-stop (& resulting ISO800) to get enough DOF to ensure that the dog was in focus. Hard to tell without seeing the unsharpened original, but FocusMagic's suggested adjustment radius at different spots in the image suggests to me that the fence might be sharper than the dog's fur.

Imagine shooting that scene with an f/2.8 zoom lens, at or near fully open aperture, to make the dog "pop out" in relation to the blurred background. How confident would you be then that the K-5 would have gotten the dog and not the fence?