[clackers]

I also have a shots like that one, with Pentax K1, AF disabled (zone focusing), also works with MF lenses. That was one shot successful out of 300 shots.

And you can see Lee gets more keepers - 94% - than with the dual pixel Canon.

If you get one shot of 300 of horses, and three out of 1000 of ice skaters - your stats, not mine - the logical conclusion to us must be you're not the guy we would want to hire for any sports photography, Biz-Engineer! Sorry.

If I swapped gear for one afternoon with the Australian Football League's chief photographer, Michael Willson, and used his Canon R3/400mm f2.8 or whatever and he had my K-1 and 300mm FA*300 with 1.4TC, his pictures would absolutely *kill* mine.

He's simply a better photographer (coincidentally, he's from my home town in the countryside), he knows what he's doing.

Our hobby, like golf, or playing violin, is a hobby of *skill*.

you also said that Fujifilm were losing money and withdrawing from the camera market. Last financial report from Fujifilm show they are profitable and growing.

Their *cameras* are making less money than in the past, the report I saw was only improvement year to year, comparing with a disastrous 2021, as part of a long time decline, right?

Your off-topic claim that they are *not* pivoting away from cameras and into healthcare is completely wrong. Their president has already announced this. The company as I've shown you in the past is profitable *despite* cameras!

https://fstoppers.com/gear/fuji-refocuses-away-photography-570640

Below from a local rodeo is another photo that apparently Pentaxes can't do.

you have an agenda

Yep, out of all the brands I currently own and shoot with, including Canon and Sony, it's Pentax that I use and love the most. I guess I do have a favourite child after all.

And here, in this clubhouse for Pentaxians world over, I and others celebrate what it does, and enjoy real useful information and beautiful pictures from fellow Pentaxians, instead of the misinformation and neglect found on the rest of the internet.

And personal opinions don't interest me, Biz-engineer. Everyone - including flat earthers - has those.

As the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: "The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject."

People like Lee present real facts. I quite agree with what Joetitch and others have said beginning with post 2 of this thread.

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Last edited by clackers; 09-08-2022 at 07:11 PM.

[Unregistered User 8]

And here, in this clubhouse for Pentaxians world over, I and others celebrate what it does, and enjoy real useful information and beautiful pictures from fellow Pentaxians, instead of the misinformation and neglect found on the rest of the internet.

Really well said, Ian.

And personal opinions don't interest me, Biz-engineer. Everyone - including flat earthers - has those.

[arnold]

Motor-cross photography has the advantage that the subject trajectory is predictable, such that it's possible to obtain sharp photos without AFC tracking.

I shot a number of international ice skating competitions (indoors) with the Pentax K1 and DFA*70-200 @ f2.8 - f/4 due to being indoors (the light isn't great). The lens is optically stunning, but the keeper rate is very very low, most shots are partially or totally out of focus, unless the subjects stop moving, which is rare. I don't go shooting ice skating with the K1 anymore because then I have to shoot the whole day and sort thousands of images to find two or three images that are in good enough focus to print at A2 or A1 sizes. The DFA* lens is really good, too bad the auto-focus of the camera is far too slow for any action photography where the subject position is not predictable. BTW, once I have removed the 997 out of focus shots from the 1000 shots on the SD cards, I get 100% keepers out of 3 images that are in focus.

Try a manual focus lens, and set a distance that you know the subject will pass through. Use some feature as a guide for knowing when the subject is in range. You will do better than 3/1000.

[Joetitch]

I must say that most ice skating I have seen has had very predictable trajectory. Very occasionally something out of the predicted. It would be helpful to know all the camera settings in this instance as there may have been, (something I have been guilty of) a setting that was inappropriate for the desired outcome. Just as an hypothetical, possibly too low an ISO in an attempt to reduce noise for the enlargement desire which left shutter speed too low to freeze the action. Etc etc etc

[Wheatfield]

I also have a shots like that one, with Pentax K1, AF disabled (zone focusing), also works with MF lenses. That was one shot successful out of 300 shots. Your image doesn't say how many were out of focus.



I don't like your attitude. You also said that Fujifilm were losing money and withdrawing from the camera market. Last financial report from Fujifilm show they are profitable and growing. Putting down others, some sort of bullying.
You are putting down someone's genuine and honest feedback from experience, the same experience that many other Pentaxians have had. You are doing this because you have an agenda, it's not nice.
Best is that nobody will comment anymore, you will comment on your own posts and agree with yourself, while the world is moving on.

One of the reasons I'm able to stay with Pentax is because none of my shooting is especially camera performance oriented.
I get a kick out of seeing the defenders of Pentax AF mount disinformation campaigns saying look how good it is, or it's all the photographer, as they show a picture that has predictable action moving in a 90° angle to the camera.
And no, they never mention they had to shoot 500 pictures to get the one good one anyway.
When I was a kid I was involved in the sport of fencing and the hobby of photography. I shot perfectly good pictures of fencing with a Spotmatic II because the action , while fast, was predictable and stayed 90° to the camera. I could use that experience to say look, one can shoot fast action without AF at all because the dice were loaded in my favour.
Some of what we do really is tech dependant, and AF is still a technology where Pentax lags though my understanding is the K3III has almost caught up to Nikon from a dozen years ago.
Shooting portraits, still lifes, products and landscapes is where Pentax is strong. A Pentax in the studio is a beautiful thing. When I was shooting with a pool of photographers I always got the jobs that required the best lenses because that's where Pentax is strong.
They never sent me out to shoot basketball games though.

[Joetitch]

Here's the point from the video. Lee manages to get the same 90+% keeper rate regardless of camera used for motocross photos. Unless someone has installed a different AF system into his Pentax, he is doing this with a camera which has supposedly poor AF. If you cannot get this sort of result using the same setup in this genre of photography then I would say that it looks like the operator of the equipment needs to apply themselves to learning more about the AF system and the techniques required to achieve the same result. Admittedly some people have the knack and some people do not. I know I don't have the required dedication to apply myself to this but it looks like there is a vocal group who are happy to blame the equipment. Segovia was approached by a concert goer who said to him that he would give all he had to be able to play like that and Segovia replied "I did"

[Rondec]

Camera gear has come a long way over the years. This has made some types of photography, like sports photography, more accessible to regular folks, whereas in the old days, manual focusing and inadequate high iso film often made it difficult.

Clearly, even now, there are some cameras that are better at this than others. An A9 probably does quite a bit better than a Sony A7r IV, but both "should" give better results than most folks would have gotten with a D700. All this is to say that rather focusing on your gear's inadequacies, you are probably better off maximizing your skill and figuring out how to get the most out of it. It may be that you need to move on to something with a faster frame rate, eventually, but even then you will have the benefit of having developed skills that are useful on any camera body.

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Last edited by Rondec; 09-20-2022 at 01:57 AM.

[clackers]

And no, they never mention they had to shoot 500 pictures to get the one good one anyway.

I'm afraid your stats simply don't match Lee's.

He got 92% and 94%, and the 94% was Pentax.

He knows what he's doing.

[yucatanPentax]

This is a sort of non-sequitur, but in high school ("secondary" in many countries) I had a small business taking photos at events in little towns around the area. I had a rudimentary dark room in a converted bathroom, with plywood sheet laid over the tub for developing trays and a plywood sheet laid over the sink for the vanity, with aluminum foil on the small window.

I'd drive to games, ceremonies, etc, take high contrast photos, develop, then offer my prints to the little small town newspapers who had someway of converting photos for old printing presses. Anyway, I'd get paid 25-50 cents per print. With gasoline around 30 cents a gallon, that paid for photography, gasoline, and some left over for a hamburger. It kept me busy, anyway.

I could get 8-12 "sellers" from a 24 exposure roll. No AF. Manual everything. Praktica L camera and 135mm Sears M42 lens.
The most popular photos were always action shots from basketball games. Everyone loved seeing their kids in the papers! Just set up in the end court and take pics when the action came to me. Get one team first half, second team next half, have pics to sell to two newspapers! I hardly even moved around. Set focus into a good zone for my flash (110v shoe mount primitive strobe, recharge squeal could be heard far away!).

Football was harder because small town field lights aren't very bright and it's too far for flash. I could get some good sideline pics though. Track events were easy in the sunlight. Graduations, etc.

I do understand that some tech these days is sorta miraculous in comparison. But that doesn't mean that skill isn't a component. Or technique. Nailing eyeball focus in action events via tech doesn't arrange composition. Pray and spray doesn't equal skill.

BTW, while I'm rambling, "silent cameras"? I was watching the Queen's funeral events. Nothing but shutter clatter clackety-clack in the background noise. If everyone's using mirrorless, why do we hear all those shutter noises at the highest profile events? And is Pentax refined shutter noise really that bad?

[redpit]

Motor-cross photography has the advantage that the subject trajectory is predictable, such that it's possible to obtain sharp photos without AFC tracking.

I shot a number of international ice skating competitions (indoors) with the Pentax K1 and DFA*70-200 @ f2.8 - f/4 due to being indoors (the light isn't great). The lens is optically stunning, but the keeper rate is very very low, most shots are partially or totally out of focus, unless the subjects stop moving, which is rare. I don't go shooting ice skating with the K1 anymore because then I have to shoot the whole day and sort thousands of images to find two or three images that are in good enough focus to print at A2 or A1 sizes. The DFA* lens is really good, too bad the auto-focus of the camera is far too slow for any action photography where the subject position is not predictable. BTW, once I have removed the 997 out of focus shots from the 1000 shots on the SD cards, I get 100% keepers out of 3 images that are in focus.

These are weird results. I'm shooting aviation photography mainly with my K-1 and lately the K-3iii. When I'm in a good shape (which means finding quickly and keeping the subject in the viewfinder as it soars past me) I have more than 80% tack sharp photos with the K-1 and less than 5% OOF frames, the rest being not that sharp but usable if you downscale the image. And in these percentages I'm also including consecutive perfectly focused frames of planes coming head on towards me with 300+ knots and planes flying low with mountains in the background where all cameras struggle to get the AF right on the subject and not the busy and continuously changing background.



The K-3iii is a different beast and that's why I only referred to my K-1 (paired with the DFA 150-450 or the DA560).

[biz-engineer]

I'm shooting aviation photography mainly with my K-1 and lately the K-3iii. When I'm in a good shape (which means finding quickly and keeping the subject in the viewfinder as it soars past me) I have more than 80% tack sharp photos with the K-1

Same for me, I get good results with aviation photography, especially with blue sky in the background. Planes move in straight lines or curved lines, and no brutal change of direction (except when they crash) or zig zag like ice skating. Not only that, but ice skater are in dim light, shooting at f2.8, close distances, depth of field no more than ~ 20 inches depth, any delay of autofocus the subject is completely out of focus . Planes distances are much further away from the photographer (fortunately), depth of field is much more relaxed. A plane is not a young athletic ice skating champion. Perhaps you can try ice skating and check how many keepers you get, I'll be happy to get your results.

[Joetitch]

Same for me, I get good results with aviation photography, especially with blue sky in the background. Planes move in straight lines or curved lines, and no brutal change of direction (except when they crash) or zig zag like ice skating. Not only that, but ice skater are in dim light, shooting at f2.8, close distances, depth of field no more than ~ 20 inches depth, any delay of autofocus the subject is completely out of focus . Planes distances are much further away from the photographer (fortunately), depth of field is much more relaxed. A plane is not a young athletic ice skating champion. Perhaps you can try ice skating and check how many keepers you get, I'll be happy to get your results.

As the topic of this thread is comparing keeper rate between cameras for a given photographer and genre, did you try with another brand? If so did the rate improve?
Frustrating though it may be to get so few keepers, until we know that another camera worked better for you or even worse for you, the comparison is incomplete.

[swanlefitte]

Stick shift vs manual transmission comes to mind. 90% of stolen cars are manual. Not because a manual is better but thieves can't drive a stick shift.

I get better photos with jpg than raw and Photoshop needs to be qualified like stolen cars.

[slartibartfast01]

Stick shift vs manual transmission comes to mind. 90% of stolen cars are manual. Not because a manual is better but thieves can't drive a stick shift.



I get better photos with jpg than raw and Photoshop needs to be qualified like stolen cars.

I thought a stick shift was manual transmission...

[RobA_Oz]

So, have we validated DPR’s meandering bicycle test, or not? I mean, motocross just doesn’t compare, does it?