Originally posted by Cinders I'm a beginner and just bought a Pentax-M 50mm 1.7. It's a lot of fun, and takes amazing pictures, but as others have pointed out, it's really difficult to shoot a moving object.
Back in the day, were no AF lenses at all, and no zooms even; and yet, people managed to shoot moving objects. (The first AF cameras date from the late 1970's.) There are various tricks:
* Focus on a place where you expect something to be, and wait for it to get there. Pioneering photojournalist Alfred Eisenstaedt famously shot an ice-skating waiter at a Swiss resort in 1930 with a 9x12cm press camera: he placed a chair along the waiter's serving trajectory, focused on the chair, and waited for the waiter to come alongside it again. SNAP!
* Use a narrow aperture and pre-focus to gain great depth-of-field (DOF). The old photojournalist's rule was:
f/8 and be there. Which means, pre-set the camera for most conditions, and stay alert. For instance, I can set an old Tokina 21/3.8 manual screwmount lens to f/11, pre-focus to 2m, and be sure that everything from 1m to infinity will be (pretty much) in focus. Something looks good: SNAP!
* Yell. People and some animals stop when you yell at them. Besides growing up in my dad's small darkroom, my siblings and I were trained from an early age to freeze when dad pointed the camera (a 6x6cm twin-lens reflex / TLR with ASA / ISO 100 film) and spoke loudly. But almost anyone and anything will hesitate and look at you if you shout. Try it: go into an action-packed venue, yell "HEY YOU F*CKHEADS!", then SNAP the shutter and run. Something like that...
* Pan and machine-gun. Panning means following a subject as it moves across your field of view. Machine-gunning means switching to Continuous or Burst shooting mode and firing away. Some purists deride this technique, but it works. Pros do it all the time. Sometimes ya gotta kiss a lotta frogs, etc.
* Use Catch-In-Focus aka Trap-Focus. This works with many lenses. Search these forums for details on how it's done. Basically you can either 1) aim at something, hold the shutter down, and slowly change focus -- when you attain focus, the shutter SNAPs; or 2) pre-focus on a place you expect something to get to, and hold the shutter down -- when the subject moves into focus, the shutter SNAPs. And there's a trick for using CIF with an AF lens. Just ask.
* Get really really really familiar with your camera and its manual lenses. With experience, judging and utilizing light and distance becomes automatic in your head and eyes and fingers. Like JS Bach told an admirer, "Look, you play organ for 50 years, even YOU can sound good!"
So, what MF lenses should you start with? Yes, a Fast Fifty is good. (That means a 50-55-58mm lens that's faster than f/2.8.) Wider is good too, especially for motion shots. Cheap 21mm's aren't real easy to find, but good reasonable 24mm's are rather plentiful. Stopped-down to f/8-11-16, you can get huge DOF. Longer lenses like 85-100-135mm are trickier (for motion) but still do-able. Just stop-down, pre-focus, and be ready. It's like the Tom Lehrer song: "You just stand there looking cute / And when something moves, you shoot."
Have fun!