Micro 4/3rds and Sports

[Muzfox]

Okay, not serious serious sports photography here, but I'm going to play around with photographing my son playing Soccor over the just starting season.

I've got the Oly Om-d E-m5 with the 12-50mm and the Panasonic 20mm.

Now, not huge reach, but it's what i"ve got to play with. One setting i'm going to have a play around with is the digital teleconverter option, should let me double my reach by cropping to the center of the image (probably help with sharpness as well). As the images are for the net at best, I'm fine with that.

I've heard not so great things about auto focus tracking with the m43rds cameras especially if the subject is moving towards or away from you directly.

Never prefocussed in my life, but it seems to be the way to go. Would picking a spot where I think something might happen, then focusing on that, go to f8 or something for more DOF and use the good ISO range to keep the shutter speed up sound like a workable idea?

If anyone has any other tips or ideas to help me out, never really shot this kind of photography before.

Oh, almost forgot, one good tip I've read that I will play with is to use the image stabilisation setting 2 which only stabilises vertically, so if your panning it only accounts for up/down movement and lets your side/side movement work unassisted.

Anyway, should be fun, let us know your ideas and I'll put some results up here for others to see as well.

[davsv1]

None of the Olympus cameras are particularly good at CAF esp compared to the pro bodies of C & N but it should be quite useable with some practice and experimentation. As with so many types of photography most gear will do an ok job if the photographer understands the limitations of the equipment and also understands how to shoot the subject and the subject itself, so watch the game and be in the right place at the right time prepared for what is unfolding and you will get what you want with any gear you have. Of course if you don't have a 300mm lens you won't get "in the thick of the action" type shots.
Re Image stabilisation, I think it is not the panacea a lot of people think it is, it needs to be understood properly to be effective. With what your going to be shooting at soccer and with the focal length your using I doubt IS will be useful , beside which you should has as higher shutter speed as you can, it would be different if you had a 300mm lens.
Best advice I can give is go out and shoot lots and if they don't seem what you were after try to figure out why and learn!

[ameerat42]

I would add: FORGET about that in-built "2X converter". You could do the same with a crop later. About the ONLY thing it could be useful for is
to check you're in focus, BUT, I reckon it would slow down the operation of the camera. (I could be wrong here, but I would guess so.)

Consider just using your longer lens and going out there with your son and putting him at the approximate distances that you could expect to shoot at.
Try some "action" shots where he's running, dodging, etc.

I do not know whether OS slows down your camera operation also, but try that out too.
I agree that you should try panning actions.

Shoot with fairly wide (apertures) and with as highish an ISO as practicable so that you can up your shutter speeds.

Good luck and I'll look forward to some results.
Am.

[Arg]

Use f8. With no lenses over 50mm you won't have much trouble shooting sports at f8.

[Bromo]

There are a few things that can be done that apparently help focusing.
1. If you shoot RAW, change the colour to Vivid. This gives a little more contrast and can supposedly help AF
2. Change the EVF to the high refresh mode

I dont really know how much difference that will make, but as a minimum do the high refresh EVF change as that will be better for panning etc.

S-AF speed is very fast, so use it to its advantage. When you pan do a quick half tap on the shutter to focus, then release and follow the subject. When you get the right moment full press the shutter to focus and shoot. C-AF aint good with the AF system being used (CDAF) so its probably best to use S-AF to the best you can. Having said that some people have been able to shoot moving dogs etc using C-AF and making the above changes, but i seriously wouldnt expect Canikon DSLR AF performance.
The next OMD model supposed (at least thats what is hinted) to have both CDAF and PDAF so tracking performance should be much much better. But that is the end of the year, not the here and now :)