focusing at a sporting event

[bishaj]

I've been using my canon 40d to shoot a lot of soccer pictures lately. I have a couple of questions.

1. When shooting in raw on manual why is my shooting rate so much slower than when I have it set to the sports setting? When I hold down the shutter it's more like one per second instead of six per second.

2. Even though I'm shooting in manual I still like to use the auto focus, but I'm having trouble with the camera focusing on the wrong peice of the action. If I'm tracking a shot and someone comes into the frame that's closer, it usually focuses in on them. I have quite a few shots that would have been great (in my opinion) that are ruined by the focusing issue.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[sk66]

Sports mode sets the camera to high shutter speed to freeze action...in manual you may be using a slower shutter speed. Also the focus can affect the rate depending on the setting.

On my Nikon there is a setting for the focus delay when tracking a subject...having a delay set prevents the camera from refocusing when a "new subject" enters the FOV.

[Sterling]

Published frame rates are not from use in RAW. These large files take the camera longer to process and write to memory than do the much smaller JPGs.

[sk66]

I think published frame rates are for any format...but it will slow down when the buffer is full which is much sooner shooting RAW.

[OsmosisStudios]

Originally Posted by Sterling

Published frame rates are not from use in RAW. These large files take the camera longer to process and write to memory than do the much smaller JPGs.

Sounds more like the sports setting automatically goes into Continuous High-Speed, but the OP isn't doing that when shooting manually.

[karen_s]

1. Not exactly sure but I would bet OsmosisStudios is right. Put your camera in manual ("M") and check your "drive mode" to make sure you have "High speed continuos" selected. (I believe the icon is a couple of boxes with an "H". It is on my 50d anyway.)

2. Check out "back button focus". You can set your camera so that focus is taken out of the shutter button and placed in a separate button on the back of the body. Heres a page from Canon's website to get you started ...

Canon Digital Learning Center - Back-Button Auto Focus Explained

[Henry Wilt]

As karen_s says, use back button focusing. It takes a little practise to get used to it but you will see the benefits are well worth the effort.

[Izzy]

During my years shooting sports ( rough stock rodeo and soccer) I always used film but the same principle applies here.

I set the shutter speed to at least 1/500 in bright light 1/1000 and let the aperture run what ever it wanted to in the program aperture mode. Also I never used auto focus. This can be tricky to learn to not use for this subject matter. I was used to mostly shooting all manual cameras and had to learn to pan and refocus on the fly.

A great exercise to try this on is either try focusing on things and keeping them in focus while someone drives the car down the road. Or you could sit some place and try focusing on moving traffic and pan and stay in focus. This sounds like something that is very hard to do but the truth is once you do it a few times it is easy to turn on that "mode" for use later.

Hope this was of some help

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