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...

Every now and then...

...you really get one. (Click on the photo for the full view).

I shot 1,047 photos at VHS Varsity Basketball v Fife last night, 443 at the girls' game and 607 at the boys' game -- the difference being mostly cheerleader shots and crowd shots and band shots during the boys' game -- and every now and then I really get one.

This was late in the fourth quarter with the Pirates fairly well up; as I remember it (it's all kinda a blur when you watch a basketball game through a viewfinder) on a steal-fast break with only one Fife defender who was able to even get close to getting back on defense.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II; 70-200mm f2.8L zoom at 70mm; ISO 6400; White Balance "fluorescent"; Exposure "Manual" at 250th second at f5.6; hand-held, available light.

A definite keeper ;-)

And both the Pirate boys and the Pirate girls Varsity won: Girls 51-38, Boys 58-43!