Women's Basketball: Penn St. v. Minnesota

Here are couple from Sunday's game. I'm not much of a sports photograpger and this was my first time shooting basketball. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

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One more:

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I shoot a lot of women's basketball with a 7D, so I know what it is capable of. I'm sorry to say that these are not in focus. Your shutter speed is good, so the softness must be due to the focus (or a bad lens?). I would also crop them tighter, to remove the extraneous players.

On the plus side, the exposure is spot on and you caught the peak action.

Keep shooting, you are almost there.

Agree. All are OOF and you can't even tell if there is any front or back focus happening so it is either a bad lens or the lens is trying to focus on something deep in BG. Were you using center point focus? AI Servo (I hope!), high frames per second? This sounds silly to but was AF on? (I ve had times when the switch on my lens accidentally get switched off!) Also what were your other settings? Shooting in manual? If you were using any pre-set mode (eg sports mode) - don't! Learn to shoot manual. Indoors, once you know lighting it won't change so it is easy to figure out what your settings should be.

Thanks for the comments. I was frustrated by the focus. I used a Tamron 17-50 2.8 in AI servo, but I am thinking that the autofocus motor could not keep with the speed of the players. The shutter was plenty fast and the lens is generally sharp with still subjects. That is the only explanation I have to account for the OOF.

What about focus points? I'm thinking that your focus settings may be the issue here:

Shot 1: "Boston Scientific" is sharp and in focus; the players are not

Shot 2: The crowd is more in focus than the players

Shot 3: Everything just seems to be averaged out, with no clear focus on anything

Now yes, it's possible you have a bad copy of this lens, but I'd explore all the possibilities before writing the lens off.

yea nice shots and i would crop tighter. looks like your lens might not be able to keep up in servo with the action. i have the same problem with my sigma 30, it can take a nice action shot sometimes but it struggles to keep up and misses focus a lot in servo.