OK: Jumping ahead in time...

...and returning to the motor-drive topic, here's a quick sketch I pulled together from four shots taken at VHS Boys Basketball v Charles Wright on 01/10/2010:

(click on the photo to see all four shots)

Historically I haven't like motor-drive much, probably because of some nonsense photography-purist stuff about wanting to catch The Moment(tm) rather than just letting the camera fire away and accepting whatever it happens to capture.

But motor-drive does work pretty well, at least if you take enough shots, which never seems to be a problem for me :-/

In this sequence there's only one shot missing, that between the third and fourth frames, which showed the shooter landing back on the floor but the ball not yet in the basket.

Timing for the sequence: 19:31:42 to 19:31:43, so roughly one second in duration, which matches the EOS 5D Mark II's advertised frame rate of 3.9 per second.

Again, I've also switched back to AI Servo auto-focus after a brief (and unexplainable) flirtation with AI Focus auto-focus, which just never seemed to do a consistently good job of tracking a moving subject, this despite the fact that it's supposed to switch from One-Shot auto-focus into AI Servo mode auto-magically.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens at 70mm; AI Servo auto-focus; ISO 6400; manual exposure at 250th second at f5.6; white balance "Fluorescent" or 4000K.

The motor-drive...

...sequences I shot at VHS Varsity Boys basketball v Cascade Christian on 12/18/09 seem to be coming out pretty well. I can see issues with consistent focusing within a series of shots: for some reason I shot with "AI Focus Auto-Focus" which is supposed to automatically switch from single-shot AF to AI Servo AF as needed.

Since the subjects in basketball are rarely stationary I have to wonder why I did it this way, but you gotta try stuff to see how stuff works.

Last night at VHS Varsity (both girls and boys) basketball v Charles Wright I shot entirely in "AI Servo ("for Moving Subjects") Auto-Focus" and very quick checks of shots while the game was underway seem to show more consistently accurate focusing through a sequence of shots, even when the subject was covering a big distance across the floor.

I'll know more when I get last night's photos burned onto DVD and get a look at them on the computer...

Wrestling...

...as I started to say elsewhere, is an interesting sport to shoot.

There's long periods of relative inactivity that are very subtle isometric battles, and then suddenly there's a burst of real motion as the balance of power shifts.

Combine that with the fact that there's a whole lot going on all at one: at the Rock Island Tournament they start out with three mats going at once, and this year (to kinda move things along..) they did the finals matches on two mats, simultaneously.

My best angle is right on the floor, on my knees (wearing my old volleyball kneepads) just inside the ropes that mark off the aisles from the mats.

So the backgrounds are incredibly busy: I'm shooting straight across the mat with the opposite bleachers in the immediate background.

There's a kind of Bruegel's-Fall-of-Icarus atmosphere about the whole thing: there's this titanic struggle going on out on the mat all the while a whole bunch of people are doing other stuff right beyond, seemingly oblivious to what's going on right in front of them.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens at 75mm; image stabilization on; AI Focus auto-focus; ISO 6400; white balance "fluorescent"; hand-held; manual exposure of 250th second at f5.6.

OK: what have...

...I learned?

That I need to shoot a lot more wrestling so I have some better feel as to what is The Real Moment(tm), so I don't shoot so bloody many photos.

I shot over 1,400 photos at Rockbusters wrestling, and over 1,700 at the Rock Island Tournament.

Part of the problem is that wrestling is characterized by relatively long periods of isometric inactivity, punctuated by relatively brief moments of very fast action.

So I have a tendency to start shooting as soon as someone flinches.

Combine that with my general policy of shooting everyone, and not just the stars, and combine that with the fact that the Rockbusters tournament went about six hours long, and the Rock Island Tournament went almost nine hours, and I get an almost-unwieldy number of photos to wade through.

Basically after the RAW files are burned to DVD I load half of them onto one Window$ box, and half onto the second Window$ box I have.

I do the post-processing (RAW conversion with exposure compensation; then rotating, cropping, levels adjustment and saving the resulting file as a tiff) on these two separate Window$ boxes, switching back and forth via a KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) switch, so I can keep the process moving along just about as fast as possible.

But it still takes a while...

:-/

Whew...

...where am I?

Post-processing Rockbusters Wrestling from 12/12/09; waiting in the wings, VHS Wrestling's Rock Island Wrestling Tournament from 12/28/09, as is Girls and Boys Varsity Basketball v Cascade Christian from 12/18/09.

I mean, I love the holidays and all, but they can be a real setback...

:-/