5D and sports

Hi guys

I was wondering if any of you guys have ever tried to use their 5D to shoot sports ?
Thanks

MikeG

I haven't tried mine on sports but I did take it out on a birding venture one day. This was more to just test the camera than anything else.

I will more than likely contintue to use my 1DMKII or 20D for this type of shooting. I like the 1.3 and 1.6 crop factor of these cameras for this type of shooting. The FPS on the MKII gives it an advantage over the others in this respect. The FPS on the 5D is probably sufficient in most cases so the deciding factor for me was the crop factor.

I love the 5D for other types of shooting but I won't be using it for this.

The 5D is a little far fetched from sports, but it can handle it. 3 FPS is slow and no 1.6X factor to make the 300mm into a 400mm etc. The 5D is best used for portraits. The canon 20D is a better buy for sports photographer since it has the 1.6 X factor and 5 FPS.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the 1.3 crop factor on the 1DMKII has a negligible advantage over the 5D. The actual crop factor of the 1DMKII is approx. 1.255 (which rounds up to the stated value of 1.3). If you take a 4368x2912 5D image and crop it down to match the 3504x2336 1DMKII image size, you would have a "crop factor equivalent" of 1.247 for the 5D. That is only a difference of 0.008.

I'm not going to try to and dispute your math as it has little bearing on the subject of this thread. Simple fact is that the 1DMKII is a better sports camera than the 5D. Cropping a 5D image defeats the purpose of going to full frame in the first place.

I have to agree with SSIM here. The 5D is not particularly suited for sports-photography. The frame rate is the key issue at hand.

Could you use a 5D to shoot sports? Sure.... of course. You could use a 10D or 20D as well. Would you get some keepers? Probably... in fact, if you were careful, you could probably nail some shots.

But I'm guessing you would also get pretty frustrated when that buffer got full.

I totally agree that the 1DMKII has advantages over the 5D for sports (focusing, fps, weather sealing). I was just responding to your comment that the deciding factor in your decision was the crop factor. I find it humorous that you would say this discussion has little bearing on the subject of the post since you brought it up in the first place and identified it as the deciding factor for you.

The purpose of my post was not to call you out or anything. I mostly wanted to make sure that I had this straight in my mind (thus the reason I asked for a correction if necessary.) I guess I must have touched a nerve. Sorry.

I am going to rent one and try it out with basketball this year. Since I will have to wait for strobes to cycle, 3 fps is just fine. Full frame not having the "x" factor for court sports is also okay as it makes lenses like the 70-200 fully usefull throughout it's range. What I am dying to see is how noiseless it can be. If I can be up at 1600 or even at 3200 with next to no noise... I am sold. I am also looking to see if its little matrix of hidden focus points in the center help resolve the 20D's gaping hole there. The 20D's single center focus point in the magic circle area just hasn't proven to be reliable enough for heavy sports shooting. Hopefully the next D solves this issue... or maybe the 5D has already done that. Time will only tell.... I have unfortunately read some reviews that say the 5ds noise performance is only marginally better then the 20d....hmmmm

The purpose of this post is to know how a camera like the 5D, no mainly designed for sport photography, can handle that kind of challenge.
In comparison, I saw indoor basket ball pix made by a 1Ds that were excellent.
What I'd like to know is how fast is 5D AF.


MikeG

I imagine it's perfectly possible to use the 5D for sports photography but for me, it would suffer the same handicap as I find when I switch to my backup EOS 10D.

I never shoot in burst mode on the 1D Mark II, but when an incident happens at a race track I will shoot rapidly and I can manually shoot at faster than 3 frames a second. When using a 3fps max. camera, I miss shots because the camera shutter mechanism cannot respond fast enough.

I've used mine on a wedding, though not as the primary as I only got it the day before, and I spent the day with it outside today. The AF is more than adequate for these purposes. It is probably not quite as fast as my 1DMKII. I would not want to recommend it for indoor basketball without having been able to try it myself in a similar venue. But as I said for the subjects I have done so far, it is a great camera with respect to AF. This also depends on the glass you are going to hang on the front of it.

Not likely as the buffer is 60JPEGs.