Sigh, once again I think we are into "AF is faster than I know how to do it". That is not the same thing as AF is faster than someone who is skilled at doing it. (And I am supprised that you, Bruce, do not seem (from your post) to have those skills (I've seen you demonstrate using the 6x7 and you seem to know all the tricks).
The technique here is to use snap focus (the opposite of fiddlely focus, grin).
You set your lens to infinity (after every shot you set it back to infinity) as
you bring the camera up you are already moving the focus towards your subject,
when your subject snaps into focus on the screen you stop and hit the shutter.
You first approximation of focus is probably the sharpest your are going to get
because after that you are adjusting your eye to the screen not the subject to
the screen. You have at least a few feet DOF to cover a slight misfocus at
these distances.
Another technique is follow focus where you just move the focus along with the
subject. That is more difficult than the snap focus technique and requires more
practice, but both work well (when you are in practice). I admit they are skills the
photographer has to learn through a lot of hard practice, and if not used for awhile
it takes a bit of work getting back to speed. But they do work, and in my opinion,
work better than autofocus most of the time. That is because autofocus while fast is
also stupid, it can not follow truely erratic motion at all, a human with practice
can. (I will admit that with straight smooth predictable follow focus a good AF
system is probably faster than a human, but the key word in this sentence is
"predictable'. And for trap focus where the camera does not have to move a
bunch of glass with a dinky motor AF is going to be faster than any human.
It all requires practice. It is not something that can be learned from reading
(my posts, or a whole book) alone. For someone who does not want to make the
effort to learn these techniques I guess automation is a godsend. But I do wish
the engineers would design the auto cameras so they do no interfear with those
skills when we do have them.
An aside based upon personal interest: How many of those 9446 images did you
actually sell? My calculator makes that a bit over 363 images per team. Not
trying to prove anything with this question just trying to decide whether such
coverage is worth while in my own case, so respond privately if you prefer.
graywolf
http://www.graywolfphoto.com
"Idiot Proof" <==> "Expert Proof"
-----------------------------------
Bruce Dayton wrote:
I prefocus quite often when the action location is predictable. The
problem comes when you are using long lenses and want very shallow DOF
and the action location is not predictable. Then AF can help. I
recently finished the local league here of 26 teams (little league
baseball) and posted 9,446 images to my ordering site. Of those,
probably about 1/2 were AF. I am glad that I have AF available to me
when I need it. There was a stretch during the season when I had to
have my main lens (Sigma 100-300/4 EX) repaired. During that time, I
could only use manual focus. My keeper rate went down some on the
shots where I couldn't predict the action location.
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