Well, I've really...

...gone and done it now.

Ordered and received a new Canon EOS 1D Mark IV.

"Wow! You must be selling a lot of photos to be able to afford something like that!"

uhh.. no.

Or, well, business is OK, particularly considering the economy, but basically I have no hope whatsoever that the 1DM4 will ever pay for itself -- maybe -- I just hope I can do OK enough to keep on top of the credit card payments.

:-/

What has happened is that since I quit working for the Vashon School District last October and got into photography full-time I've been shooting a lot of sports, and shooting more and more in Continuous Shooting (oldtimers would call it "motor-drive") Drive Mode.

Shot a *lot* of basketball, lacrosse, baseball and soccer last winter and spring.

And what I kept seeing over and over again is, in it's simplest, the fact that four frames per second* (which is what my EOS 5D Mark II can do) is just not fast enough to shoot sports.

I mean, you get good photos, but when I'm doing RAW conversion I keep seeing that the one or two shots that I might have got in between the ones I *did* get would have been the ones I really wanted.

Not the shooter's arm coming up for the shot, or the basketball gone and on it's way to the basket, but the one or two shots where the ball is just coming off the shooter's fingertips.

Not the lacrosse stick back over the shoulder, or the lacrosse stick out at full extension toward the goal, but the one or two shots where the lacrosse ball is just coming out of the pouch.

Not the soccer ball several feet up over the player's head, but the one or two shots where the soccer ball is sitting right on his forehead as the player heads the ball.

You get the idea.

Now, granted that motor-drive mode is just a crap-shoot anyway: you press the shutter, the camera starts recording images at a (relatively) set interval, and hopefully one or two of them will be taken at The Moment(tm).

You'd think that four frames per second would be enough, but sports is really fast.

So after having spent the winter and spring constantly fretting about the shots I *should* have gotten but didn't, I finally decided to jump into the issue with both feet.

So, we'll soon see: fall sports (Vashon High School football, girls' soccer, volleyball, boys' tennis) starts in about two weeks.

Also to be seen: whether or not Canon has solved the significant AI Servo auto-focus issues that plagued the Canon EOS 1D Mark III.

Stay tuned! It should be an interesting fall...



* All references to frames per second for the 5D Mk II and the 1D Mk IV are using a UDMA 6 Compact Flash card -- Sandisk "Extreme Pro" 16GB compact flash cards, in fact

Seems I should have...

...done more night photography at the Vashon Island Strawberry Festival this year.


These are from Friday night at Ober Park, the Tom Bean Blues band.


Canon EOS 5D Mark II; Canon 70-200mm f2.8L zoom lens at 70mm; Auto-focus one shot; single-center focus point; ISO 6400; Aperture Value exposure; f3.2 at 200th second; Metering Mode center-weighted average; Auto white balance as shot, but RAW conversion with Tungsten white balance.