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Canon 1d Mark IV + 70-200 Mark II shots

bradhusick

Active member
Canon 1D Mark IV + 70-200mm Mark II shots

Just got this combo for some sports shooting. 10 frames/sec, 16 megapixels. It's a workout just lifting it, but a monopod makes it all okay. Still learning the camera and all the focus tracking options.

Click to enlarge (my son's the goalie.)
 
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bradhusick

Active member
here are two 100% crops from one of the full frame images. click to enlarge.

200mm, f/4, 1/1500 sec. ISO 100. 4896 x 3264 pixels.
 
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M5-Guy

New member
these are some great action shoots...
What ISO and shutter speed did you use?
I have a gallery of some Little League players in action, and even 1/1000 sometimes doesn't cut it, but yet I can get a razor sharp 1/800. I think it has more to do with the direction of travel in relation to the camera angle. At over 100 feet out, I don't think DOF has much of role at f/4-8 with a 70-300, or 70-200. I might be mistaken though.

Did your sons teem win, or was it practice?
 

LJL

New member
Nice shots, Brad. Glad to see the MkIV and the new 70-200 play well together. Also looks like you had rather nice, bright conditions for shooting, and that did not create too much contrast....always a worry.

You cannot be too serious about the heft of that combo, though after a while, it does seem like it gets heavier ;-) (I shoot with the 400/2.8L IS, and THAT is some serious weight, while I have the "light" 70-200/2.8L IS around my neck for close in shots.)

Cannot tell from some of the other shots, but it looks like f2.8-4 may be the sweetspot for bokeh, especially with bright leaves and stuff in the background. hard to get that stuff smooth on bright days.

M5-Guy----it can be really surprising just how thin DOF can be at some distances. I shoot a lot of stuff with the 70-200 at f4 or 4.5, for smoother OOF, and the "penalty" can be one player in focus, the one a step in front or behind being out of focus. You are right about movement also with respect to sharpness. For action stuff, I try not to get below 1/1000 -1/1250 most of the time, unless the subject is moving only slightly obliquely to the camera. I mainly shoot polo, so speed of play and movement tends to be much faster, but stuff like this, football, and soccer have surprisingly quick movements on some plays that are hard to stop or get really sharp without higher shutter speeds.

This combo is in the "replacement queue" for me right now, so it is nice to see some results from folks using it.

LJ
 

bradhusick

Active member
I did find that nearly all the shots benefited from some added fill and some highlight recovery in Lightroom. It was a clear sunny day, so the contrast was high. I am still getting used to the fairly strong AA filter on the camera. I do most of my work with a Leica M9 with no AA filter, so my workflow has to change to compensate. Rob Galbraith once gave me a sharpening trick to do this - he unsharp-masks at 250, 0.3, 0 and it snaps the photo into sharpness without adding noise. Here's an example of that crop with and without the trick applied:
 
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Congratulations on you new setup. That should do extremely well for sports.

If you are using Lightroom, you can increase Clarity some to compensate for the AA filter. This is similar to using unsharp mask in Photoshop. I don't increase clarity on my Leica M8 or S2 photos (no AA), but just about always increase clarity +15 to +25 (which really isn't much) on almost all of my AA filter cameras (Leica X1 and Canon).

Mark
 
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