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Forthright Review on 1DIII : 1DIIN remains king of sports focus!

Steve Saunders

New member
...Steve, maybe you could even temporarily switch cameras with your fellow shooter, so that you shoot the MkII and he/she shoots with your MkIII. That way both shooters shoot with both cameras.


Yes that should be possible, once I know I will be meeting up with them. I get my weekend assignments on Friday, so I'll make a few calls then.
 

Steve Saunders

New member
Quick MkIII Focus test

Sorry but I couldn't remember the thread where I said I'd do a test, so I've started a new one. I didn't get to meet up with any Canon shooters using the MkII last weekend, only 30D and similar and lots of Nikons. I mean when I was shooting Nikon, I was always outnumbered by the Canon guys. Where were they all when I needed them last Saturday?

Anyway, this sequence is the closest I got to a test. I have to hand it to Rob Galbraith for putting the time into his tests, this just isn't easy unless you dedicate lots of time specifically to it. These are 600x350 pixel crops, the original image that you can see in the small film strip to the left of the crops. I saved the Jpeg at quality 9 so the crops look almost like they did before I saved the whole test file, sorry it's 432kbs as that's as low as I could go without it looking terrible.

The centre point of each crop is about where I had the centre focus point (as far as I remember anyway) and from that you can probably gather that the players were all over the place. Lens was the 300IS USM L shot wide open at f2.8 and the relevant camera settings were;

AV mode.
ISO 320.
Jpeg fine with no in-camera or PS sharpening.
AI servo, centre focus point, 5fps.
Shutter speed was;
1/2500sec on shots 1,2,3 and 9.
1/2000sec on shots 4,5,6 and 8.
1/1600sec on shot 7.
The whole sequence was shot over 2 seconds at I think 4fps.

Not very scientific I'm afraid, but I have to say I'm quite happy with it all and have had no problems.

Mk3test.jpg
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Great effort, Steve!

Glad you set this test up. Now there's an idea that you might test, and that is to add more focus points so the camera has no need to re-choose if the cetner focus point target is lost.

The depth of focus of course is limited. What distance were you from the players?

What exaclly did you focus on? The face is more detail rich, as is the ball. The arm and yellow band in the first image is not really in sharo focus, but the sleeve on the left seems to be.

So what is being tracked We need to know that to judge the success or not of the focus tracking here.

This is the kind of sequence that we need to see to disclose what is possible.

Thanks,

Asher
 

Steve Saunders

New member
Hi Asher. The centre of each crop is roughly where I focussed. I say roughly because these guys were struggling and zigging and zagging all over the place, typical of Gaelic Football. This of course makes it very difficult to hold a particular focus target.

The second crop is a bit wrong, I should have cropped further to the left, so the focus point would have been more left as well. Only excuse I have is that it was late last night when I did the editing in PS, and sure I'm just as human as the next guy or girl after all. But I'd say when I do another test tomorrow, I'll have learned from all this and will know how to do it properly. If time allows, I'll get one of my biker friends to rid towards me with a fixed point of focus for me to target. Then I'll do the crops again.
First shot was about 150 feet away and the last about 70 feet, that's guessing of course. If temperature is a factor in how the AF behaves, it was dull and cloudy but warm at 14 degrees C.

I should mention that I shoot these same teams at this same venue and in almost identical conditions quite often, always previously with Nikon D2X and D200 and their super 300VR f2.8 lens. The bottom line is that I just can't see any real downside with the Canon, if anything I have a higher keeper rate as the MKIII seems to hunt less and finds initial focus faster than the Nikons.
 

Steve Saunders

New member
"Last edited by Ray West : Today at 11:08 AM. Reason: I merged these threads, hope that's OK"


That's cool with me Ray. I think this is where I meant to post it in the first place!
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Steve,

You're work is much appreciated! now have you seen any mahor improvement grabbing and maintaining focus in low light? That's a major peeve with the 5D and 1DII, for me at least.

Asher
 

Steve Saunders

New member
I haven't taken any pics indoors yet, but I've toyed with the AF indoors and it seems to grab focus very fast and without hunting.

BTW, I just installed the Canon software and I see that Zoombrowser EX can be set to display the focus points on the image, so you know exactly where you focussed. Very useful for the testing.
 
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