Taking Action Shots

tbk

Hi,
I've been shooting a lot of action shots lately of the swim team that my kid is on and also a number of surfing shots. I keep reading that the best shot is to have it in manual mode, but it is hard to keep a focus on a moving subject like the surfer. I use a 70-300mm AF-S w/VR f/4.5-5.6 (love the lens btw) and I keep it in action mode. How can I control the focus of my moving subject and what type of settings would be good to use (i.e. nice sunny day). Any help would be greatly appreciated.
If you would like to check out my shots, my Instagram is tobinkoehler. Would be nice to here a critique from a professional.

Thanks again!

bruto

Focusing the D3200 on action will always be a little bit of a challenge, as its focus engine is not as hot as that on higher models, but you can do pretty well, I think, if you put it on C (continuous servo) and Dynamic Area focusing. If you lock focus on your subject, the focus should continue to follow the subject at a steady motion.

You can also try 3D focusing, which is said to work better if motion is irregular. In this mode, further information is processed by the camera's brain, including color, and it can often follow a subject that darts about or is not moving steadily. It can also jump to the wrong subject, though, if it loses the one you've chosen.

In all cases, you're probably best off using the center focus point, which is more sensitive than the others. Make sure to recenter it from time to time as it's easy to move by accident. Use the [OK] button to recenter.

You should also practice panning. If your subject is a swimmer and moves at a fairly uniform speed, practice moving the camera along with him or her, and this will make the AF job easier. The closer the subject is to the original focus point, the more likely it will stay put.

Another option if you have difficulty locking focus, and your subject is far enough away to allow a bit of slop in depth of field, is to switch your camera to back button focus. This takes some practice to get used to, but the idea here is that AF only operates when you push the back (AE/AF) lock button. When you let go of the button, the camera reverts to release priority and will shoot without requiring a perfect focus lock. If the subject is within your depth of field, you get it even if the camera does not think it's perfectly focused. If you were in the usual shutter-button AF mode, the camera may continue to hunt for focus, and if it doesn't lock on, it will refuse to fire. This mode works well for shots at flying objects where the sky makes AF difficult, and also if you can prefocus on an area and wait for your subject to arrive. The problem, of course, is that if you forget to focus you get a blurry shot, just as you would if you manually focus wrong. It takes some practice to remember to do it.

I have been trying to get the back button habit, because you can leave the AF mode at C, giving continuous servo focusing while the button is pushed, but when you let go of the button you can recompose at leisure.

Back button focusing is a menu choice, in Setup > buttons > AF ON.

tbk

Thanks Bruto! I will try some of those settings at the next practice. I just got the cheat sheets for the 55-300mm. I figure it is close enough to mine, the 70-300mm, to be using the same settings.

Like I said before, if you have time to check out my instagram shots, I would love the feedback.

Thanks again!

bruto

I'm not entirely sure I got all that was there, and Instagram stalled several times (crummy laptop computer and DSL that behaves more like a fast dial up), but I managed to open a page of surfing shots which, at least at the scale there, looked quite nice. I'm guessing that (as is true for all of us) you took many more than you saved, but the ones there look well exposed and focused, and capture the event well. A couple looked as if they might have been cropped a bit much and might benefit from a bit more scale to show the mighty size of the waves, but it's hard to guess. Anyway, It looks as if the exposures are good and at least on these shots you got the focus in the right range. Manual focusing does have the advantage that if your subject is within the depth of field available, you catch it without shutter lag.

tbk

Thanks Bruto! Yeah, that is the problem with Instagram, sometimes it makes you crop your pic down to a size you don't agree with. And with the waves being a bit smaller this week, you didn't have a lot to work with. It would be nice to have a spot on the website here to post some of our work. Thanks again for your feedback! Always appreciated!

TBK

bruto

It would be nice to have some hosting, but I cannot fault the administrator for not wanting to pay for the bandwidth. I'm sure it's expensive, and even some photo specific sites like Photo.net limit their picture size severely.

I have used various free dropbox type services, to which one can link, and these have at least some virtue in allowing bigger files, but many have their own viewers that chop pixels and also strip out EXIF info. They also don't do very well at isolating pictures, so anything you put on will be find-able to anyone who links to one.

For basic viewing of the occasional shot, you might try Jumpshare, which allows you do download a picture and then makes a link to it. It includes a desktop icon to which you can drag a file, whereupon it puts the URL in your clipboard.

So for example, here's one copied a while ago to demonstrate the results from a home made macro lens: (see here)

Note that as usual, EXIF info is stripped out, and in this case my save was, though not cropped, severely down-sampled to 700 pixel width, which makes it work faster and is sufficient for the net if the sampling is well done.