Junior Soccer Part II

It's Sunday again and, despite the weather predictions, junior soccer was on this morning. I was keen to get back out there with the 1D Mk3, this time shooting from the goal-side of the field head-on to the action.

Canon 1D Mk3 with Canon 75-300mm IS lens at f5.6 @1/1500th, ISO 800

I set the camera up again as per last week (see the previous post), for the optimum AF selections for soccer (according to Canon). I still, however, didn't feel like I was getting the full 10fps machine gun burst that the Mk3 is capable of, and was beginning to worry that there was something wrong with the camera itself?

1D Mk3 with 75-300mm at f5.6 @1/1500th sec, ISO 800 (at 300mm)

One thing I did change from last week was to go hand-held so that I could shoot predominantly in the portrait orientation. Because I was shooting hand held, I left the IS of the lens on, to help with any shake I may have introduced. The 75-300mm is the first lens Canon made with IS, and you can tell. It clanks, whirs and buzzes while the IS is working, and while this does give a more stable image, it is a little distracting. After a few sluggish bursts, I figured that the shutter speed (of around 1500th sec) was fast enough not to actually need the IS turned on, even hand-held, so I turned it off. No more whizz, whir, click. But suddenly.... bang, bang, bang - a series of machine gun burst that were exhilarating!  The camera was finally shooting at its full 10fps. Yay! :-)

1D Mk3 with Canon 75-300mm IS lens, with IS turned OFF.

So lesson number 7 (or whatever number I'm up to know on my gradual coming to grips with the 1D Mk3): if you want the full 10fps burst speed of the camera, turn the darn IS off! Maybe that's not the case with the more modern image stablised lenses, but it sure is the case with the 75-300mm. Makes perfect sense to me now that I've figured it out - there were a lot of things happening in that lens to stabilise the image and get a sharp shot. It's really not surprising that to do all that it needed to slow the frame rate down.

All-in-all then, a successful morning. Josh's team won (and he played really well), I got some okay images, and learnt how to get the full speed out of the Canon 1D MkIII. As Mr Burns would say - "Excellent".