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Comments
I find that shooting moving objects with the D3200 is a bit iffy even with practice, but generally seem to do better with AFA or C, and dynamic or 3-d focus. AFA seems to make the shift to continuous well enough.
But for dynamic focusing to work, you must first nail the subject. If the subject moves before initial focus is established, it will not track the subject. Thus, it may well be that the lens is your limiting factor here if it cannot finish focusing in time. Improvement in panning technique can help a lot, as sometimes can widening your view so it's easier to find the subject, and there's more of it to focus on. Of course you can't do that with a prime lens.
If your subject is a relatively consistent distance from the camera, it can help speed things up by manually focusing first to something close. AF time will be diminished some if it does not have to hunt far.
For best results, set your cam to AF-C and Dynamic area mode with the center AF point active. Also set your drive mode to continuous. Nail your focus and pan with your subject as you shoot. Auto focus requires light to work, so shooting with large aperture would help. But while shooting wide open helps AF performance, it reduces your margin of error since it shrinks your depth of field, so you'll need to balance that out.
For something like soccer, it can be challenging for the D3100. There’s so much action, change in direction, and things moving in and out of your frame which will confuse the camera’s AF. Well, at least that’s what I’ve found to be the case with my D5100. What I like to do is not track longer than 2 seconds at a time. Just acquire focus and then hold the shutter to fire off a quick burst of shots while panning with the subject. Then let go. Reacquire focus and repeat. Think of it as playing a first-person shooter video game with an automatic weapon. You never want to just hold the trigger and fire away constantly. That’s just wasting shots and you lose accuracy. Always shoot quick short bursts.
By the way, when trying to freeze action, you don’t really need something to stabilize the camera. If you’re ripping off shots at 1/500 or 1/1000 sec on a 200mm lens, that’s more than fast enough to eliminate camera shake. So just hand-hold it. The improved maneuverability may help.
Now, if you were shooting race cars and you’re trying to pan laterally with the car with a relatively slow shutter in order to freeze the car but convey motion blur on the background and the wheels, then stabilization would help.
I can only agree with all the above expert advice. However, a technique which I use, and many sports photographers, is something called predictive focussing. The idea is that you try to predict an area where the action will happen and pre-focus on that area. In reality, the process is not as random as it might seem and one soon gets a feel for it. Ever noticed that many sports photographers squat to the rear of a goal in soccer for example. They are assuming that if any good action is going to happen, it is likely to happen in this area.
Regards,
PBked
I fear that I'm expecting the pictures to be much more clear than perhaps is reasonable, but on the other hand, if I'm not doing something right, then I want to correct it. I took a portrait of my daughter and her friend last weekend, and I thought I had all the settings proper and in the great light it would have been crystal clear, and it wasn't. More to learn I guess.
If the camera and lens are on auto-focus and it fires, then it thinks it's in focus (won't fire until it does). The thing you need to do is to find out whether there's an error in the focusing (camera problem) or whether it's focusing on the wrong thing (operator problem). Study the fuzzy shots you got, and see if something other than the subject is sharper.
If you suspect that the focus is out of adjustment, take two identical shots; one with the viewfinder and one in live mode. Live mode is slower to focus and less useful for action, but it uses the image on the sensor itself. So whatever it is focused on should be as sharp as your camera and lens can deliver. If the 18-55mm is working right, it should be good and sharp.
This brings me to another thought. Even with a shallow depth of field, if I'm shooting an action shot of a soccer player, as long as I've hit my focus point properly on them as the subject, can I expect their entire body to be in focus? I mean, can the depth of field get narrower than a person's body? My daughters' season ends this Saturday, so I'm going to try smaller apertures if the light permits and see how I do. I'm not shooting at less than 500 speed, so that's probably going to be tricky. I have mostly used Dynamic and Auto for the Focus settings, but I may try some Single-point too.
I really do enjoy shooting with my DSLR more than my prior point-and-shoot. I took some great shots before, but there's so much more power with the DSLR. Now I just have to make sure I'm harnessing that power correctly. ;-) I expect that I'll probably find myself looking towards higher-end gear in no time, but right now I simply can't afford that.
Also, if you are trying to nail a specific object, auto-area focus mode may not work well. In this mode, the camera decides the likeliest object to focus on, and if your chosen object is not obvious, it may choose the wrong one. Try dynamic and either AF-A or AFC, and then if you can grab a player in the center spot, the player should stay in focus as she moves.
Remember that although it's always best to avoid the noise of high ISO if you can, a sharp picture in high ISO is going to be more satisfying than a blurry one in low ISO. So if you must, raise the ISO before you lose depth of field or sufficient shutter speed. You can get a pretty tolerable picture of a human player on a field even in a high ISO that would be a bit problematic for a static scene.
Can depth of field get narrower than a person’s body? Yes. If you have the right lens and use the right settings, it’s very easy to have a person’s eyes in sharp focus but then have his nose look very soft. Let’s go back to the context of photographing action sports with the 55-200mm. At 200mm with aperture at f/5.6 and having the entire body of the soccer player in frame, you can indeed have the entire body to be in focus.
I think the issue is WHERE you land your focus point. Using Dynamic Area and AF-A is fine. As always when photographing people, you want to land your focus point on the eye. There’s a couple reasons for this:
1. When looking at photos, people always gravitate towards the eye. As long as the eye is in focus, the entire photo will be conceived to be in focus by most people.
2. DOF extends 1/3 in front of your focus point and 2/3 behind it. For example, based on your distance to subject, your focal length, and your aperture setting, the DOF comes out to be about 1 ft. Then that means the space that would be in sharp focus will extend 4 inches in front of where you focus point is and 8 inches behind it. Notice where your eye is in relation to the front and back of your body. If you focus on the eye, you’ll maximize how much of the body is in focus.
The largest target to focus on is the torso. Don’t do it. If you focus on a point where there’s nothing between it and the camera, you’ve just wasted 1/3 of your DOF.
So, here’s the TLDR version to maximize the 55-200mm lens’ potential for action sports:
- Just shoot at max aperture. That lens needs all the light it can get.
- Dynamic Area and AF-A (or AF-C)
- Land focus point on the eye. Remember to pan with your subject to try to keep the AF point on the eye.
For specific settings, try this:
Shutter priority mode with shutter speed set at 1/500 (or faster)
Dynamic area
AF-A or AF-C
Auto-ISO with max ISO at 3200 or 6400
Due to this lens’ limitations, it’s best if it was used in daylight. This lens isn’t effective at all for indoors sports; that’s when you should look to higher end gear. Unfortunately, fast tele lenses specifically for DX are hard to come by. Nikon doesn’t make any. Sigma used to have a 50-150mm f/2.8 which has since been discontinued. The only option appears to be to use full-frame lenses such as the variations of the 70-200mm.
I find on the D3200 that AFA usually is smart enough to switch from S to C mode when needed, but if you're shooting sports, you should probably go to AFC to be sure. Dynamic area mode will keep focus on a moving subject if you're holding down the shutter button, but its ability is limited. So the better you become at panning the better you'll do.
The eye focus observations make great sense, and I will work on that in my technique. Thanks again, I'll let you know how I make out tomorrow. :-)
I can kick this off. Here’s a shot I took a few weeks ago. https://flic.kr/p/pBPwL8
It’s not a good example of focusing on the eyes since my son has small eyes (darn my Asian genes!), but you can see it’s very possible to get the entire body in focus. This was taken at 200mm, f/4, 1/500, ISO-640.
However, in the mean time, it might help you to determine if there really is any fault or softness in your equipment.
Remember that you pay no real price for wasted photographs, so you can take a whole lot of experimental shots just to gather information, and then erase them.
You need to figure out several things. Is your camera itself focusing properly? Is your lens soft? Are you holding it steady?
What I would suggest as a starting point is to put your normal lens on (or whatever lens you expect to be the sharpest), use a mid-range if it's a zoom, set it to f/8, put the camera at a low ISO, support it on a tripod or a table (VR off if on a tripod), and aim it at something fairly complex like a brick wall or patterned wallpaper. If the camera is on a tripod or table and needs no support, take your hands off and fire it with the self timer. Now look at the picture. Is it sharp? If it is not sharp enough when you do this, then stop right here. It never will be. If it's soft, try the same thing again with manual focus and live view, taking great care. If this is much better, then perhaps your viewfinder focus needs adjusting (not a do it yourself thing).
If you have confirmed that the camera is working well enough, your next shots should be an attempt to see if you are getting motion blur, or focus errors. Try any lenses you have at different focal lengths. Try static subjects and moving subjects. Practice and try to figure out what techniques work and what ones don't. Try to figure out what focal lengths and shutter speeds are most reliable, and what autofocus settings get the best results. Many telephoto lenses get a bit soft at the far end, though this varies a lot. You might find a 55-200mm works better at 175mm.
More to come...
I guess one thing you need to wonder is whether your camera is actually working properly on auto focus. I am presuming you've double checked the AF settings on lens and camera, the electrical connections, and can hear the focus motor working when you are shooting.
I suggest you take a couple of shots and read the card directly into View NX2 to make sure that some other editing program has not erased them. Make sure you toggle the appropriate setting in View NX2 to make sure it's right. If your auto focus is working, it ought to show the focus points.
Edit to add: I have been looking further into this, and as far as I can see with the D3100 (which has no option for turning off focus priority as many other models do), you cannot shoot a picture unless either the camera has locked onto focus, or you're on manual. The only reason why focus points would not be shown in View NX2 in this case would be either that the files have been edited, or that the camera was firing in manual focus mode. Other models, such as the D5xxx, can be custom set to shoot even if focus is not achieved When this occurs, the box will not appear in ViewNX2. This is not the case for the D3100. I can't seem to force my D3200 not to show the focus point in any AF mode.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/129542504@N04/15644042699/in/photostream/
You might want to review what your various autofocus settings are, including focus hold and what functions are assigned to the shutter button. If you are in the habit of focusing first on a subject and then recomposing, make sure that your AF is set to stay on when you move the camera with the shutter button part way down. This will allow you to focus on a face and then move the camera to a better composition without moving the focus point. In View NX2, the indicated focus point will still be shown as the center because it's recording what the camera setting was, rather than what was focused on before you recomposed.
The trash can monster looks more like motion blur than depth of field. Remember that depth of field increases with distance, so that, for example, at that shallow DOF, roughly 1/3 of your DOF will be in front of the focus point, and 2/3 behind. For this reason, when you must compromise, try to figure out what your far and close points will be, and put your focal point a bit forward of the mid-point. You still need to compromise, and sometimes it just is not going to happen.
I'm a little surprised that the f/9 portrait did not catch both faces better, but it looks a bit as if you focused a little too far forward on that one. The little girl's life jacket belt looks sharper than everything else, but depth of field at that close distance is always going to be difficult. You're probably better off trying for greater physical distance. If you don't intend to print very large, you might even find it works better to add some distance just to gain depth of field and crop to taste.
Overall though, I think you're doing better than you fear. One of the things to remember when viewing your pictures is that what you see on the screen is a JPG preview, not the RAW file beneath. Not all viewing programs will give you the best looking image at every screen resolution. The differences are often tiny, but both the program and the monitor can make a difference.
My introduction to digital was this spring when I went to the Galapagos with my new D3200. As I downloaded the pictures to the laptop, I was not too disappointed, but not too thrilled either, especially when I downsized them to smaller JPG's. Then I took those JPG's to a desktop Apple with a new monitor, and wow, they were pretty good! I got a new monitor when i came home. I'm viewing these now on a rather crappy laptop, and I bet if I put your pictures on that new big monitor they'd look a good bit better.
As for the View NX2 issue, I don't think you should need to re-install it. It should be backward compatible, and if the image opens in it at all, I am pretty sure that it should work. I can't say for sure since I don't have a D3100 to try on mine. I think I have three different versions of the program; one from the D3200, one from the D7100, and one from the net, and all work OK. I also have Capture NX-D, the more recent Nikon program, which you can download from Nikon. That gives me the focus points for my D3200 shots as well.
It remains a mystery. The only thing I can think of is that some processing removed that information, as it's pretty clear from the pictures shown that your camera is focusing as it should.