Tony Cooper
On Fri, 4 Apr 2014 19:42:29 -0700, Savageduck <savageduck1@{REMOVESPAM}me.com>wrote:

Savageduck
On 2014-04-05 01:52:59 +0000, Tony Cooper <tonycooper214@gmail.com>said:

Tony Cooper
On Fri, 4 Apr 2014 08:39:45 -0700, Savageduck <savageduck1@{REMOVESPAM}me.com>wrote:

Savageduck
...but why do we have to revisit this again and again when the issue has been beaten to death several times?

Tony Cooper
Because there's no talk of photography. Here, I'll get the ball rolling with some recent shots.

http://tonycooper.smugmug.com/Babe-Ruth-Baseball-2014/i-mbcJGhj/0/XL/2014-04-02-051-XL.jpg

Savageduck
stuff.

How do you like your D300?

Tony Cooper
It's fine. The continuous mode shoots more fps than the D60, and that does help. Still, I don't go crazy with multiple shots. I average maybe three frames for a slide into home. Old film habits of conserving frames die hard.

For sports shots, I use center weight, Single Area, and CL. And, RAW of course, and Manual (usually) and sometimes Speed but not that much. I haven't set up any Custom Shooting settings.

My limitation is still glass. I can't get wide open enough to blur those backgrounds.

the baseball shots, I'm restricted to shooting "through the diamonds"...through the diamond-shaped openings in the chain link fence. That makes it hard to track action because part of that fence ends up graying out an area.

While the fence is a problem in traversing the field, I rely mostly on anticipating where the action will be. If there's a runner on third, I'm framing and focusing on home plate before the pitch. I'm always ready for one base ahead of where the runner is. What I miss is infield action like a pop-up fly. I can't get the camera through the diamond quickly enough.

One grandson is the catcher, so he's the subject of a lot of shots: http://tonycooper.smugmug.com/Babe-Ruth-Baseball-2014/i-kg5bcvs/0/XL/2014-03-13-136-XL.jpg

wasn't my grandson in the catcher shot above. That was one of our players sliding into home)

The other grandson is the first baseman, and you can see him in the distance. Haven't got a good shot of him at first this year, but here's one of him at bat trying to avoid a bad pitch: http://tonycooper.smugmug.com/Babe-Ruth-Baseball-2014/i-bv6bXLN/0/XL/2014-03-25-33-XL.jpg

a batter, I like to get the ball in the frame and press the shutter when the batter's forward shoulder drops or he starts to lean forward. That tells me that one of my three shots has a good chance of getting the ball in the frame. I don't even look at the pitcher or try to see the ball.

Since the light changes quickly with late afternoon games, the ability to change the ISO with a top button is an advantage. The D300 produces less grain at higher ISO than the D60, but neither is a good high ISO camera.

I do not care for the multi-focus point settings, and stay with single area. When I tried the multi-focus point settings, I found too many images where the wrong part of the player was in focus and was trying to salvage bad shots. With single area, it's either sharp or not sharp.

The baseball and barrel racing shots were all processed solely in LR. I shoot so many images in this type of situation that LR works OK. I try for images of all the team members, not just my two. But, I think I do a better job of post in CS. The barrel race arena was covered, so the lighting was very poor. No flash was used, of course.

I changed the Subject to take us out of the silliness.