Graydon wrote:
What I've been finding is that no amount of careful propping on terrain, breath control, etc. really helps with being perfectly still for *range*;
See, that's a big difference right there. The stuff I shoot, cars at high speed in close proximity, leaves lots of room for "acceptable error". Critical focus doesn't appear anywhere in the lexicon of someone standing ten or twenty feet from cars going past at a hundred miles an hour (no joke). I'm lucky if the whole damned thing isn't an overwashed watercolor of abstract blurs.
left to right and up and down motions are much easier to control than front-to-back motion, and of course it's the slight front-to-back motion that throws off the focus.
The stuff I shoot, I dial in enough DoF to take care of it and shoot like a madman. At the 'nearer infinity' end of the focus range, DoF isn't an issue at any "reasonable" f stop. Shooting flowers in the front yard, I care about DoF and critical focus. Shooting race cars a few feet away from me, I just try not to get killed.
I get maybe one in five right on hand-holding 800 or 500 mm mirror lenses; I can't imagine a heavier lens makes this easier. Autofocus probably would.
Sheer physics means I wouldn't find much use for really long glass at the track. Yeah, I would get another hundred shots, but I'm doing three or four thousand shots in a four-day event anyway ... and "close due to magnification" shots just don't have the same "soiled underwear" feel that actually close to the action shots do. Or maybe it's just me. 16mm at ten feet fighting the aerodynamic wake is just ... uh ... exciting ... yeah, that's it. Exciting. Just /slightly/ less exciting than being the guy creating that wake. Road Atlanta's turn six is just ... uh ... exciting.
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