Quote:
Originally Posted by The1
what auto focus are you shooting with? AI servo for the moving animal? or do you find it's too imprecise? I tryed that back in the summer with my 5D when shooting my girlfriend horse jumping, and i found that when focusing on the horses head, the servo would be too slow to keep up with movement and i'd have the horses ass in focus.
some of the shots made me feel a lot like a horses ass when this happened.
I ended up pre focusing on the jumps and waiting for the horse and rider to get to the location i wanted, then snapped, this worked best in the end with the 5D's auto focus.
I'm hoping my 7D will be better for that. but if not, i'll still get to take about 3 -4 shots before horse is back on the ground. so far i've been able to have a little fun with it while standing in the ring with my girlfriend jumping right beside me, but i won't be able to do that in the summer. Then it's back to the side lines figureing out if i can auto focus or prefocus to get the shot. At least i'll have proper lighting in the summer again  |
I used AI servo set on Fast and 9-point active AF points, because I was looking for a flight shot. The hawk had landed on a vol behind some cattails where I couldn't see the bird, so as I approached I prefocused on a point that I thought was the right distance. When the bird came up I kept it in the middle of the box of nine AF points and shot several bursts of three to five as it flew away. This was probably about the 3rd shot out of the series.
I also own the 5D MkII and find the 7D way better for this kind of thing. Here I was using f/4 and was pretty close to the bird, so the AF had to be spot on. If I hadn't pre-focused I'd have been likely to miss the bird since it would have been several shots before the camera caught up. Also, since the bird was low, I need to make certain that I kept the AF points on the bird because the camera will focus on the background if you let the points get off the subject.
For your horse type situation, I too would have prefocused on the jump, but I would have tried to shoot at f/11 or smaller to increase DOF. At wide open apertures it could be very trick, where you might get the horse's eye in focus, but not the rider. You have to be careful that the camera doesn't focus on the jump, so I'd experiment with single-point, expanded point and even 19-point. With the 7D you can even manually activate individual points, in case the middle of the frame is not what you need.
I learned to work around the AF of my 5D2 and it works fine in most situations, BUT the 7D is faster and more flexible in these regards. I hope the MkIII is as good as the 7D in this regard and the fps speeds up to at least 5-fps.