[dosdan]

Here's some stats. Today, I shot 1,582 K-3 raw files at a weekly daytime athletics meet. That took up 46.0 GB. Based on the 59.4 GB available space (with 1GB = 2^20 bytes, not 10^9) on a Sandisk 64 GB Extreme Pro SD card, I estimate that I'd be able to fit 2,042 shots on the card.

This was on the same battery. There was still charge in it. I don't normally look at the battery indicator, since I don't find them very linear, so I'm not sure if it was still showing all the bars or not. Much of this were AF.C bursts. The vast majority of these were shot with a Sigma 70-200/F2.8 II HSM (non-OS). So for sports use with this type of lens and this type of shooting, it appears you should be able to get at least 1,500 shots from a battery.

Since I only covered a portion of the events, namely hurdles, sprints and mid-distance, I can see that it will be easy to shoot 2,000+ shots at a meeting (I try to take multiple shots of every competitor) and get really bogged down in the selection, cropping, leveling (I shoot on a tripod to reduce this) and raw adjustment process.

BTW, the Instant Review is set to 3s, but I don't have time (and it's difficult in the sunshine) to review. So, if this was switched off (I sometimes do this for sports, but forgot at this meeting), the power consumption would be reduced a bit more.

Dan.

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Last edited by dosdan; 02-01-2014 at 09:01 PM.

[saladin]

Thats a hell of a lot of shots, Dan! Both in terms of battery life and just having to sift through them!

I've shot some of my kids Little Ath's mornings in melbourne and 6-700 shots can be tedious enough to sort and choose, lol.

[dosdan]

I've shot some of my kids Little Ath's mornings in melbourne and 6-700 shots can be tedious enough to sort and choose, lol.

I used to do 600-700 shots with the K-5 at a Queensland Christian Soccer Association weekly soccer match. (I try to get interesting photos of everyone in both teams). That was bad enough. This year, with the K-3, it may be more (season starts April).

With weekly Little Athletics club meets, special LA carnivals/pentathlons, LA regional & state championship events, Queensland Primary Schools Track & Field district, regional & state championships & QCSA weekly club and state titles representative team soccer matches, I've got more than enough to shoot.

Dan.

[gosman]

Hope to shoot the barrel racing tomorrow at the Ft Worth stock show with my K-3. Hope to get some nice ones. First time to use a camera like this. IstDS my last one!

[crewl1]

I provide sound for dance competitions and worked an event in a High School gym this weekend.
This gives me a chance to practice my photography, and since I am babysitting a DA*50-135 I brought it along to compare to my SIgma 70-200 OS which is what I normally use.

The DA* did OK, but its SDM AF was not as fast to reach focus as the Sigma's HSM.
The DA* was usable in AF-C and in a pinch could do reasonably well, but if you want to keep up with the action the Sigma would be the better choice.
The advantage with the DA* was that the 50mm low end let me go a little wider when the dancers came close to my position.

Here are a samples, the solos are with the DA*50-135 and the team shots are with the Sigma
I used TAv with aperture at f3.2, shutter speed 1/500, ISO varied between 3200 and 6400.

[Miguel]

Here are a samples, the solos are with the DA*50-135 and the team shots are with the Sigma
I used TAv with aperture at f3.2, shutter speed 1/500, ISO varied between 3200 and 6400.

The differences between lens captures are not subtle, are they?

They are all an improvement over past efforts, so congrats on that. I particularly like the last one due to the background being semi-harmonious, and the next to last one because of the woman's million dollar smile. You froze the action quite well, 'tis a shame that these artistic dancers are competing with such unartistic backgrounds. Not much you can do of course. I'm sure their families are very happy. Nice work.

M

[crewl1]

Thanks Miguel.
These events fill up with spectators so both bleachers need to be available for seating, no chance of putting up any sort of a backdrop.
I have had in the back of my mind that once I get tired of doing the sound services and pass that off to an associate, I could start offering photographic services where I could control the scene better.
I haven't had too much opportunity to shoot the events this season so not totally sure I have gotten any better at it but I appreciate the comments.

The differences between the two lenses are more pronounced when zooming into the image, at web sizes my poor eye can't really see it but I am sure others can.
The Sigma does a much better job of being on focus in an instant.
I also feel at similar apertures the Sigma is sharper.
It really proves out to be the more appropriate lens for indoor sports, and the K-3 I feel does a much better job of tracking the moving dancers than my K-5 did.

[Alex Nostalgix]

The DA* did OK, but its SDM AF was not as fast to reach focus as the Sigma's HSM.
The DA* was usable in AF-C and in a pinch could do reasonably well, but if you want to keep up with the action the Sigma would be the better choice.

This sums up my choice, though still waiting for some action photos with tamron 70-200 (unless i missed it). Fingers crossed for next month lens purchase.

[RonHendriks1966]

I provide sound for dance competitions and worked an event in a High School gym this weekend.
This gives me a chance to practice my photography, and since I am babysitting a DA*50-135 I brought it along to compare to my SIgma 70-200 OS which is what I normally use.

The DA* did OK, but its SDM AF was not as fast to reach focus as the Sigma's HSM.
The DA* was usable in AF-C and in a pinch could do reasonably well, but if you want to keep up with the action the Sigma would be the better choice.
The advantage with the DA* was that the 50mm low end let me go a little wider when the dancers came close to my position.

Here are a samples, the solos are with the DA*50-135 and the team shots are with the Sigma
I used TAv with aperture at f3.2, shutter speed 1/500, ISO varied between 3200 and 6400.

Well that lens is slower in AF, but the first image is real good.

[rawr]

For ISO 4000-6400, these images turned out very well indeed.

[crewl1]

Well that lens is slower in AF, but the first image is real good.

Thanks.

For ISO 4000-6400, these images turned out very well indeed.

The k-3 noise is fairly easy to clean up and maintains detail well.
At a previous event I shot the K-5 and K-3 side by side and found the noise from the K-3 at 6400 was similar to the K-5 at 3200.

[wpompen]

This sums up my choice, though still waiting for some action photos with tamron 70-200 (unless i missed it). Fingers crossed for next month lens purchase.

I'll post some later today :-)

[dosdan]

Low-light with action. How often does this situation strike fear? I was shooting my son doing Long Jump in a Pentathlon. It was late and the day was overcast so it got darkish early. The sporting field floodlights had come on, but the long jump was off to a side near trees and didn't get a great amount of artificial light.

I'd been shooting other events at the Pentathlon with the K-3 & DA* 60-250/F4, but since the light was getting weak, I switched to the Sigma 70-200/F2.8 II HSM. I normally shoot long jump close to the ground so I can show the elevation the jumper gets. But at this field there was a fence around the two jumping tracks, so I had to stand on an embankment, with the lens resting on the top of the end fence. In this resting position I was unable to easily turn the zoom ring during the jump, so I had to shoot the whole jumping sequence at a fixed 70mm FL. The high shooting position means that the shot I'm presenting here gives little impression of the jump height achieved, but it's better than trying to shoot through a chain-wire fence.

Camera settings were LL desperation stuff: Matrix metering, TAv, AF.C Extended Area M (25-point), 1/800s, f/2.8, ISO5000.

First off, the original shot with default raw development.




Using ISO5000 & f/2.8 has turned semi-dusk into day. (The bright spot above his head is a lamp, possibly a street light.) The shot was developed in SilkyPix Developer Pro 5. (Only SP development controls used for the 3 versions shown here.) I let SP5 make use of its database of camera models & ISO-specific default parameters. It is cognisant of the sensel size & MP. So the various sub-settings in the Sharpness, NR & Demosaic Sharpness sections are all of SP's choosing. I wanted to see how good a job it did. (The NR is supposed to be better in SP5 than in SP4, supposedly up to LR quality.)

If you look in front of the blue cone on the right, you'll see a slight shadow, being cast by the flood lights. So the front of the jumper was slightly shadowed. (Some of the earlier shots in the sequence in the run-up phase, when his feet are close to the ground, show a more distinct shadow.) In the image version below, cropped the way I like it, I've applied some global dodging and raised the black point slightly. Comparing the position of the green peak on the histogram, this is equiv. to about a +0.3EV boost on the front of the jumper i.e. similar to shooting at ISO6400. Image size of this crop is 13.9MP, so it's approx. the same number of pixels you'd get if you shot with a higher FL on a K-5. (I didn't want to zoom more than 70mm FL as, due to my closeness, the athlete in the landing part of the jumping sequence got very large by the end of the jump.)




Finally, here is a 100% crop from the 2nd image, showing the amount of sharpness vs noise trade-off:



You can see there's still a reasonable amount of detail left at this level of ISO & NR. The noise is now obvious, but you usually don't look at an image with this high a level of zoom-in. I could increase the amount of NR but, for web presentation or A4/11" sized printing, it should be fine.

The light level for the camera settings is 7 LV. However, when you consider lens transmission losses and the use of dodging, the actual light level was probably 6.5 LV or a little less.

Also, the K-3 & Sigma 70-200/F2.8 AF combo did well under this lighting level considering the speed of the subject's approach.


Dan.

[rawr]

More useful field reporting. Thank you for all the details.

Matrix metering,

In shooting low-light with telephoto, I never use matrix. Always centre-weighted.

In many telephoto scenes - exactly like this one - it's not important that the whole frame be metered, including all of the un-important peripheral activity taking place behind your son. The valuable action is usually mostly in the centre of a scene with telephoto. It's likely centre-weighted would probably have dealt with the shadowing of his body better.

[dosdan]

It's likely centre-weighted would probably have dealt with the shadowing of his body better.

True. I usually use centre-weighted AE metering on the K-5. With the K-3, I'm trusting the matrix metering a bit more. In any case, with raw shooting any high ISO differences are done digitally, so it's not going to make a significant difference if you adjust the image brightness in PP. However, at least using matrix metering reduces the possibility of the brighter background elements near his head being blown, which can end up being distracting.

Dan.