7DII + 400/2.8 does indoor tennis

With all the winter weather we've been having, all of our home opener baseball and softball games got cancelled or postponed, so I still have yet to try the 7DII outside. So for now, I thought I would put it up to the test in our indoor tennis facility. The quantity of light in there is decent (ISO4000) but the lights cycle very badly. I enabled the flicker mode and I saw it being activated ("Flicker!" pops up in the bottom right of the viewfinder) for 75% of my shots. While I didn't do any scientific testing, I did notice a vast improvement in consistency. I still had to adjust the WB for the outermost courts, but all adjustments were consistent for each location. Really neat feature overall. I still need to try an AFMA on the long glass... results are reasonably sharp, but something is slightly off as I can't get that tack level of sharpness like I do in the 1DXs. Still don't know if it's me or the equipment though.

Settings for all shots: 1/1000th, f/2.8, ISO4000, 400mm (640mm effective).

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Great stuff as usual Andrew. I enjoy all your stuff.

As for the sharpness with the long glass on the 7D II, AFMA may help some. But I would venture a guess that the 7D II may require a bit more shutter speed than the 1DX would under the same conditions due to pixel density differences. Even so, I wouldn't expect the sharpness to match the 1DX, just from what I have seen posted from 7D II's so far.

Very nice.

Nice stuff. Looks good to me.

WOW awesome images, well done.
Stuart.

Thanks everybody!

rdalrt wrote in post #17455950
Great stuff as usual Andrew. I enjoy all your stuff.

As for the sharpness with the long glass on the 7D II, AFMA may help some. But I would venture a guess that the 7D II may require a bit more shutter speed than the 1DX would under the same conditions due to pixel density differences. Even so, I wouldn't expect the sharpness to match the 1DX, just from what I have seen posted from 7D II's so far.

That's a good theory. I am hoping to see in an improvement outdoors. I would expect a little more sharpness from a crop body with such an advanced autofocus system, especially given the greater DOF. I will hold my judgement on the sharpness until I get it out in the light for baseball and softball.

Nice shots; really enjoyed the emotion and intensity captured in their facial expressions.

abruckse wrote in post #17456608
Thanks everybody!

I would expect a little more sharpness from a crop body with such an advanced autofocus system, especially given the greater DOF. I will hold my judgement on the sharpness until I get it out in the light for baseball and softball.

While this statement is technically correct, i.e. 'greater DOF' of a Crop, it is also, in this case, possibly not. The pixel density of the 7D2 is significantly higher than that of the 1Dx. Because of this, the critical plane of focus is going to be much more crisply defined and the areas in front of and behind the 'slice of focus' are going to appear far more quickly Out Of Focus - i.e. the bigger 1Dx pixels are in fact making the DoF appear larger than it actually is and the reverse is true of the 7D2. This may or may not be what you are seeing.

Secondly, and importantly, 4000 ISO on a 7D2 is no where near as clean as 4000 on a 1Dx. That said, and this is important, 4000 ISO on the 7D2 can be cleaned better in Post and it may just require more post Sharpening and Noise Reduction than you would ever think of doing or need to do with your 1Dx.

Finally, there has been some useful posts on the number of auto-focus points chosen and how this appears to affect the successful 'hit rate' - i.e. Expanded 4 and Expanded 8 appear to have a decent 'hit rate' keeper improvement over center point only.


I have posted a link below that references this effect.

http://neilvn.com …omparison-depth-of-field/

Thanks for the info. Pixel density is a topic that always confused me, so I will read up on that.

As far as noise differences, I'm well aware. I'm limited on the amount of NR on the 7DII files due to the sharpness issue. I've noticed that the 7dII files can take more NR and require a lot more color noise reduction, but I have to back off in order to keep the sharpness I do have.

For autofocus points, I have yet to leave the central dual-crosstype sensor. I can see point expansion's use, but my experience with it hasn't been very good when shooting very tight (600mm plus). At that focal length it becomes very difficult to keep the focus point on a moving subject, therefore it would be more likely for one of the expansion point to waver and grab something else in error. This is especially true in tennis, since it's a lot of side-to-side movement. I'll play with it though.

i shoot hockey and have settled on expanded 4 - i believe it represents the sweet spot in terms of higher hit rate than Spot AF and still narrow enough to reduce the chance of other unintended players grabbing the camera's focus

Another thing about shooting tennis is that you should move your focus point to the left or the right depending on the forhand or backhand. When shooting tennis I never use the centre focus point but use one that I locate as close to the face as I can. Here is an example from a 1Dx and 300/2.8@2.8 at ISO 16000 and1/640th .

On the 1DX's I do move the focus point depending on what I'm trying to capture. I move around even more when I'm shooting with the 600mm... it's almost a requirement at that point since you have no room to crop. On the 7DII I kept it on the center point to take advantage of the dual-cross type sensor in an attempt to give the camera the best possible chance. This was an experimental shoot just trying to get more comfortable with the 7DII... I could have shot with a 1DX, but I like going out of my comfort zone and testing new things every once in a while, plus it's just fun playing with new equipment.

abruckse wrote in post #17457873
On the 1DX's I do move the focus point depending on what I'm trying to capture. I move around even more when I'm shooting with the 600mm... it's almost a requirement at that point since you have no room to crop. On the 7DII I kept it on the center point to take advantage of the dual-cross type sensor in an attempt to give the camera the best possible chance. This was an experimental shoot just trying to get more comfortable with the 7DII... I could have shot with a 1DX, but I like going out of my comfort zone and testing new things every once in a while, plus it's just fun playing with new equipment.

Andrew - I really do appreciate you testing out the 7D2 with the 400 trying to do a sport like tennis. If you get a chance again, it would be really great if you could try expanded 4 to conduct a hit-rate success test versus centre point only. I think for some reason this is one of the real differences between the 1Dx and 7D2 - the 7D2 really benefits with expanded 4 I think because of the smaller pixel size and the inability to get the same contrast information of the 1Dx's larger pixels. Would really appreciate it. Thanks. Paul

Nice shots!

I finally got a chance to use this combo again, but outdoors. Overall, I'm much more pleased with the results. Not sure what exactly which variable(s) contributed to this (better AF from daylight, better AF from point expansion, stopped down to /f/4), but sharpness is much better. Here are a few samples.

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